. She saw the light
from a candle flickering out through the window. Tess was sure she had
left the hut dark--she had extinguished the light just before going out
for the milk. Who was in the hut? Or had she made a mistake, and left
the candle there? For the sake of the child she had to enter. She set
down the pail, lifted her skirt, wiped away the traces of tears. Then,
flinging wide the door, she came upon Ben Letts.

CHAPTER XXXV

Ben was standing beside the bed, with the open grape-basket in his hand,
looking down intently upon the child. His one eye flashed past Tess in
its blindness, while the watery one with the red veins running through
it distorted itself into a squint, and brought its evil gaze upon her.
The fat chin, covered with a stubby growth of hair, shook with malicious
pleasure, the dark teeth set grimly through the brown, tobacco-stained
lips.

"It air a brat!" he said at last, Tess standing paralyzed. "Air its
Pappy the--"

He did not finish. Tess snatched the basket from his hand, and covered
the whining babe.

"Ye be allers snoopin' yer nose in some one's else's business," she said
darkly, her fear of him growing with each minute. "Ye can't keep from my
hut any day, and ye ain't no right here nuther."

"I telled ye and the student that the time'd come when I'd get even with
ye both--and it air here!... It air here, I say!"

"The student ain't nothin' to do with this here brat," retorted Tess.
"Ye thinks as how ye knows a heap.... Well, ye don't.... And it air time
for ye to be a-goin' now, Ben Letts!"

"I air a-goin' to stay," said he, "Daddy's" stool creaking under his
weight.

From a tree near the forest Tess could hear the screech of a night-owl
die away in smothered laughter. The scraping of the willow on the tin
roof came dimly to her in the silence. If some other squatter would only
come along! God had always saved her from Ben Letts.--Dared she pray?
Her eyes sought the window. If she could only see the pine-tree
God!--send Him a little petition--He would forgive and save her. Dominie
Graves had gone completely from her mind; only a wish, a desperate wish,
came to escape the man who had constantly thrown his menacing shadow
across the path of her life. Suddenly her bosom heaved. A verse was
thrown bomb-like into her mind. Tess opened her lips and muttered,
keeping her eyes upon the fisherman.

"If ye have faith as the grain of mustard-seed, ye shall say unto this
mountai