o its part. Raven pulled forward
a chair, and he sank into it.

"What do you s'pose," he began--and the voice was so nearly a whimper
that Raven was not surprised to see tears on his cheeks--"what do you
s'pose I wanted my gun for? To use on you? Or him? No. On me. But I
don't know now as I've got the strength to use it. I'm done."

This was his remorse for the past as he had made it, and Raven had no
triumph in it, only a sickness of distaste for the man's suffering and a
frank hatred of having to meet it with him.

"You know," said Tenney, looking up at him, sharply now, as if to
ascertain how much he knew, "she didn't do it. The baby wa'n't overlaid.
God! did anybody believe she could do a thing like that? She slep' like
a cat for fear suthin' would happen to him."

"What," asked Raven, in horror of what he felt was coming, and yet
obliged to hear, "what did happen to him?"

Tenney stretched out his hands. He was looking at them, not at Raven.

"I can't git it out o' my head," he continued, in a broken whisper,
"there's suthin' on 'em. You don't see nothin', do you? They look to
me----"

There he stopped, and Raven was glad he did not venture the word. What
had Raven to say to him? There seemed not to be anything in the language
of man, to say. But Tenney came alive. He was shaking with a great
eagerness.

"I tell you," he said, "a man don't know what to do. There was
that--that--what I done it to--he wa'n't mine."

He looked at Raven in a hunger of supplication. He was almost dying to
be denied.

"Yes," said Raven steadily. "He was yours."

"How do you know?" shrieked Tenney, as if he had caught him. "She talk
things over?"

Raven considered. What could he say to him?

"Tenney," he said at last, "you haven't understood. You haven't seen her
as she was, the best woman, the most beautiful----"

Here he stopped, and Tenney threw in angrily, as if it were a part of
his quarrel with her:

"She was likely enough. But what made her," he continued violently,
"what made her let a man feel as if her mind was somewheres else? Where
was her mind?"

That was it, Raven told himself. Beauty! it promised ineffable things,
even to these eyes of jealous greed, and it could not fulfil the promise
because everything it whispered of lay in the upper heavens, not on
earth. But Tenney would not have heard the answer even if Raven could
have made it. He was broken. He bent his head into his hands and sobbed
aloud.