"I ain't alone," she said.

Tenney had turned his head, to listen.

"We ain't alone, Isr'el, be we?" she challenged breathlessly.

"I dunno what you're talkin' about," said Tenney uneasily, and she laughed.

It was, Raven wonderingly thought, a light-hearted laugh, as if she had no longer anything to bear.

"Why," said she, "same as I told you. We ain't alone a minute o' the time, if we don't feel to be. He's with us, the Lord Jesus Christ."

The telephone bell rang and she went off to answer it. Tenney, as if with a hopeful conviction that another man would understand, turned his eyes upon Raven.

"What's anybody want to talk like that for?" he questioned irrepressibly.

"It's the way you talk yourself," said Raven. "That's precisely what you said last night."

"It's no kind of a way----" Tenney began, and then pulled himself up.

Raven believed that he meant it was one thing to invoke the Founder of his religion in a sacerdotal sense, but not for the comforting certainty of a real Presence. "Seems if anybody's crazed. Seems if----" Here he broke off again, and Raven took satisfaction in the concluding phrase: "It's no way to talk when a man's lamed himself so's't he can't git round the room 'thout bleedin' to death."

By this Raven understood the man was, in an hysterical way, afraid of Tira and her surprising invocation. He judged things were looking rather better for her, and went off almost cheerfully, without waiting for her return.

XXVI

When Raven came to Nan's, he went in without knocking and found the house still. He called her name, and she answered from an upper distance. Presently she appeared, traveling bag in hand, and came down to him.

"You really want me, Rookie?" she asked him, pausing at the closet door where she had hung her hat and coat. "You want an unattached female, unchaperoned, very much at large?"

"I want her," said Raven, "more than anything else I'm likely to get in this frowsy world. As to chaperons, Charlotte will do very well, without legging it over here every night to keep you in countenance."

Nan put on her hat and coat, and he picked up the bag.

"Back door locked?" he asked.

She laughed.

"Yes," said she. "That shows I meant to come. Go ahead, Rookie. I'll lock this door." Mid-way down the path, she glanced at him and then ventured: "You look very much set up. What is it, Rookie? what happened?"

"The thing that's happened," said Raven, with a little reminiscent laugh, "is that Tenney's afraid of his wife. And he's cut his foot and can't get away from her. I call it the most ironical of time's revenges I've ever had the pleasure of seeing."

He went on and told her the story of Tenney's disabled foot. Nan, listening, did not take it in.

"But I don't see," she offered, "why it makes him afraid of her."

"It doesn't. Though it makes it more difficult for him to get at her.

The thing that's bowled him over is that she's taken him at his word.

He's told her the Founder of his religion is everywhere present, and now she's accepted it and a.s.sumes the Presence is there in the kitchen, it scares him. He a.s.sumes she's dotty. Hence he's afraid of her. You see, Nan, the Presence he's in the habit of invoking is something he conceives of as belonging to strictly sacerdotal occasions. Really, it's a form of words. But she believes it and that, as I told you, scares him. It's like raising a ghost. He's raised it and somebody's seen it and he's scared."

"Can't the queerest things happen," Nan asked him, in a discursiveness he found nevertheless relevant, "here in New England? There isn't a human trait or a morbid outcrop but we've got it. See! Charlotte's at the window. S'pose she'll want me?"

"She'll love it," said Raven. He lifted up his voice and called and Charlotte left the window to appear at the door. "I've got her, Charlotte," said Raven. "She's going to make us a visit. Give us almond pudding for dinner, can't you?"

It was too late for that, Charlotte told him indulgently, but she guessed there'd be suthin'. She lingered in the hall while Nan took off her coat, and volunteered information about the fire being lighted in the west chamber.

"I 'most thought you'd come," she said, in a way softly confidential.

"You can settle right down now, you two, an' visit."

She put a hand for an instant on Nan's shoulder and Nan felt the glow of her beneficence. Did Charlotte know what it was to her to have even one evening alone with Rookie? Charlotte knew most things. Probably she knew that.

Nan and Raven had their noon dinner and went for a walk, up the road.

That led them past Tenney's and when they reached the house Raven said:

"You wait a jiff and I'll ask how he is."

Tira came, in answer to his knock. She was gravely calm, not even disturbed in her secret mind, Raven concluded, not keyed up by inner apprehension, and keeping herself firm. Where, he wondered absently, at the same instant, did she get those clothes, blue, always worn to the exact point of soft loveliness, the very moral of her eyes? She glanced down the path at Nan, and Nan waved to her. Tira gave a serious little bow and turned her glance to Raven, who inquired:

"How's his foot?"

"It pains him a good deal," she said, with that softness he had noted in her voice while they dressed the hurt. "He has to set with it in a chair. It worries him to death not to git round."

"Good Lord!" said Raven. "You must think I'm a nice chap. Who's doing the barn work?"

"Oh," said Tira, "that's all right. I can see to that. I always do when he's gone for day's works."

"You can't water the stock."

"Oh, yes, I can." Now she smiled at him, beautifully, bewilderingly, for his kindness in asking. "I done it before dinner. That's nothin'.

Besides, I like it: takes me out door."

"Don't do any more," said Raven. "We'll be over, 'long about four o'clock, Jerry or I." Then, for he had forgotten Tenney, in his awareness of her, he remembered to ask: "The doctor came, did he?"

She nodded gravely.

"Say anything?"

She shook her head, and then offered, it seemed unwillingly:

"He thought he might be laid up quite a spell."

To Raven, that seemed so desirable, that he wondered at the commiseration in her voice; evidently she could be sorry for Tenney without an admixture of relief at having him safely fettered for a while.

"Well," he said, "I'll be over. And if there's anything----" he stopped and looked her in the eyes, gravely authoritative. It was the first time their two inner selves had met in such unrestrained interchange. If there was anything he could do for her, the glance said, she was to know he would do it, to the very limit of allegiance. What did her own glance say? Was there acceptance in it? Not so much that as a grave understanding and grat.i.tude. He was her refuge, her strength. She might still go winging brokenly about the obscurity that made her life, but he was the shelter where she might take cover if she would. Their gaze broke (it was locked there an instant only) and however she felt in turning from him, Raven had the sensation of dragging his eyes away.

"I'll be over," he said, "in time to fodder and milk."