r hand with the same questioning gaze,
and, after a moment, when Tira, reading his mind, felt her heart beating
wildly, he went to the sink and pumped water into the basin. He began to
wash his hands. There was nothing on them, no stain such as his fearful
mind projected, but he washed them furiously and without looking.

"You stop a minute," said Tira quietly. "I'll give you a mite o' hot
water, if you'll wait."

She filled a dipper from the tea kettle, and, tipping the water from his
basin into the sink, mixed hot and cold, trying it solicitously, and
left him to use it.

"There!" she said, standing by the table waiting for him, "you come as
quick's you can. Your tea'll be cold."

So they drank their tea together, and Tira forced herself to eat, and,
from the store of woman's experience within her, knew she ought to urge
him also to hearten himself with meat and bread. But she did not dare.
She could feel the misery of his sick mind. She had always felt it. But
there were reactions, of obstinacy, of rage almost, in the obscurity of
its workings, and these she could not challenge. But she poured him
strong tea, and when he would take no more, got up and cleared the
table. And he kept his place, staring down at his hand. He was studying
it with a look curiously detached, precisely as he had regarded it at
the moment when he seemed to become aware of its invisible stain. Tira,
as she went back and forth about the room, found herself also, by force
of his attitude, glancing at the hand. Almost she expected to find it
red. When her work was done, she sat down by the stove and undressed the
baby, who was fretful still and crying in a way she was thankful to
hear. It made a small commotion in the room. If it irritated Tenney into
waking from his daze, so much the better.

Ten o'clock came, and Tenney had not stirred. When eleven struck she
roused from her doze and saw his head had sunken forward; he was at the
nodding point of sleep. She had been keeping up the fire, and presently
she rose to put in wood, knocking down a stick she had left on the end
of the stove to be reached for noiselessly. He started awake and rose,
pushing back his chair.

"Is that them?" he asked her, with a disordered wildness of mien. "Have
they come?"

By this she knew he expected arrest for what he had done.

"No," she said, in her quietest voice. "Nobody's comin' here to-night. I
dropped a stick o' wood, that's all. Don't you think you be