brary a while."

When she had gone Raven, sitting there by Dick, who did not speak again,
listened for the murmur of voices from the library. Would they keep
companionable vigil, the two women, heartening each other by a word, or
would they sit aloof, each wrapped in her own grief? There was not a
sound. They were falling in with that determination of the house to
maintain its sinister stillness, its air of knowing more than it would
tell.

XXXIX

Tenney, not finding the key of the hut, and increasingly alive to the
anguish flaring in his foot, went home by the back way. Tira was waiting
at the door. She saw him coming, and, for that first moment, he could
ignore the pain in a savage recognition of her plight. She had, he
thought, having missed the key, not even tried the door. But this brief
summary of her guilty folly angered him for the moment only. He was
suddenly tired, and his foot did ache outrageously. He gave way to the
pain of it, and limped heavily. As he neared the house, however, his
face did relax into a mirthless smile. There were tracks under the
kitchen window. She had hoped to get in that way and had found the
window fastened. And all the time there was the door, ready for a
confident hand. But the ill chance of it amused him for not much more
than the instant of its occurrence. His mind recoiled upon his own
miserable state. He had gone out in search of justice, and he had come
home in terror of what he had himself unjustly done. If he had been
imaginative enough to predict the righteous satisfaction he expected
from his vengeance on Raven, he might have foreseen himself coming back
to bring Tira the evil news, and smiling, out of his general rectitude,
at her grief and terror. Perhaps he would have been wrong in those
unformulated assumptions. Perhaps he would not have been calm enough for
satisfaction in the completed deed, since the mind does, after a red
act, become at once fugitive before the furies of inherited beliefs and
fears. Perhaps it would have shrunk cowering back from the old, old
penalty against the letting of blood, as it did now when he was faced
with the tragic irony of the deed as it was. He had shed blood and, by
one of the savage mischances of life, the blood of a man innocent of
offense against him. After the first glance at Tira, he did not look at
her again, but passed her, threw open the door, and went in. His
thoughts, becoming every instant more confused, as the