nstantly looked out again.

"God Almighty bless you!" she said. "But you go! you go!"

"Tira!" called Raven sharply, "don't you know you're in danger? Don't
you know if anything happens to you it'll----" He paused, and Nan
wondered if he meant to say, "It will break my heart!" and scarcely felt
the pain of it, she was so tense with misery for them both.

Tira leaned out again and seemed to bend even protectingly toward them.
She smiled at them, and the softening of her face was exquisite.

"I ain't in danger," she said. "I've said things to him. He's afraid."

"Threatened him?" Raven asked.

"I've kep' tellin' him," said Tira, in that same tone of tender
reasonableness such as mothers use when they persuade children to the
necessities of things, "he must remember we ain't alone. An' somehow it
seems to scare him. He don't see Him as I do: the Lord Jesus Christ."

She shut the window quietly, and Raven and Nan went away. They walked
soberly home without a word, but when Nan was taking off her hat she
heard bells and went to the library window. Raven was standing by the
table, trying to find some occupation to steady his anxious mind.

"Look!" said Nan.

It was Tenney, and he was "whipping up."

"She knew, didn't she?" commented Nan, and he answered:

"Yes, she knew."

Here his trouble of mind broke forth. He had to be enlightened. A woman
must guess what a woman thought.

"I can't understand her," he said. "I believe I have understood her, up
to now. But to say the child's got to bear it with her! Why, a woman's
feeling about her child! It's as old as the world. A woman will
sacrifice herself, but she won't sacrifice her child."

He looked at her with such trouble in his face that Nan had to turn
away. He understood her too well. Could he read in her eyes what her
mind had resolved not to tell him? Yet she would tell him. He shouldn't
grope about in the dark among these mysteries. She wanted, as much as
Old Crow wanted it, to be a light to his feet.

"She would," she told him quietly, "sacrifice herself in a minute. Only
she can't do it the way we've offered her, because now you've come into
it."

"I've been in it from the first," frowned Raven. "Ever since the day I
found her up there in the woods."

"Yes, but then that poor crazy idiot was jealous only of him, the
creature that sat down by her at prayer-meeting; and now he's jealous of
you. And she's saving you, Rookie. At any risk. Even her own chi