onounce judgment, would repudiate him for
betraying a dead woman's trust. Well, let it. The impeccability of his
own soul wasn't so very valuable, after all, weighed against what he saw
as the indisputable values of mortal life. He lay back on his bed,
exhausted by the fight, foolishly exhausted because, he told himself,
there hadn't been any real Anne. Only her mind, as he had known it, and
his own mind had been grappling, like two sides of an argument. But
while he tried to dull himself with this denial of the possibilities
beyond our sense, he knew underneath that there had been Anne. And she
had gone. She would not come again.

Then he must have slept, for there was a gulf of forgetfulness, and when
his eyes came open, it was on Tenney standing there in the doorway.
Raven felt squalid after the night in his clothes, and Tenney looked to
him in much the same case. Also Tenney was shrunken, even since he had
come to the hut the day before, and then he had seemed not
three-quarters of his height. He asked now, not as if he cared, but as
if he wondered idly:

"D' I leave my ammunition up here?"

He had the gun in his hand.

"Let the gun alone," said Raven. He got up and took it away from him,
and Tenney dumbly suffered it. "We'll go down now and have some
breakfast, and Jerry'll do your chores."

"I can do my own chores," said Tenney. "I can go into the barn, I
guess."

By this Raven understood that he did not mean to go into the house.
Perhaps he was afraid of it. Men are afraid of houses that have grown
sinister because of knowing too much.

That day was a curious medley of watchfulness over Tenney: for Raven
felt the necessity of following him about to see he did himself no harm.
He called him in to breakfast, but Tenney did not even seem to hear, and
stood brooding in the yard, looking curiously down at his lame foot and
lifting it as if to judge how far it would serve him. Then Charlotte,
who had been watching from the window, went out and told him she had a
bite for him in the shed, and he went in with her at once and drank
coffee and ate the bread she buttered. He didn't, so he told her, want
to touch things any more. So she broke the bread and he carried the
pieces to his mouth with an air of hating them and fearing. When he went
over to his house, Raven went with him, and, finding Jerry had milked
and driven the cows to pasture, they stood outside, miserably loitering,
because Tenney had evidently made