"You won't come in?" she said to Raven. "Don't you think you'd better. Half an hour or so?"
"Not a minute," said Raven. "Good night."
He left them and after a few striding steps was aware of Charlotte, calling him. She came up and spoke his name.
"Tira Tenney. With the baby. This time o' night."
"Front o' the house, just as I come out."
"Then she was coming there," he burst forth. "Too bad! too bad! Didn't you know that? Didn't you ask her in?"
"Yes," said Charlotte, "I asked her in an' she said no, she was goin' down along. An' I stood an' watched her an' she turned off up the rise into the woods."
So it had begun, the terror, the flight. She was going to the hut and, for some reason, not the back way.
"There's somethin' 'tain't right," Charlotte was beginning, but he seized her wrist and held it. To keep her attention, or to feel the touch of something kindly and warm?
"Yes," he said, "something's wrong. Don't tell, Charlotte. Not a word--not to Nan or Jerry or--above all not to Tenney. I'll see to it."
He left her and hurried loping along the road, almost at a run, and Charlotte went in to Nan.
Raven passed his house and turned into the wood road. There he did not slacken, but took the rise at a great gait. He was at the hut a moment after Tira: she had had time for neither light nor fire.
"It's Raven," he called. She did not come, and he added: "I'm alone. Let me in."
Waiting there at the door, he had time to note the stillness of the woods, the creak of a branch now and then, and the half-drawn sigh from the breeze you hardly felt. At the instant of his beginning to wonder whether she might have fallen there from a hurt or whether she was even terrified of him, he heard the sound of the key and the door opened. He stepped in and her hand was at once on the key. She turned it and melted noiselessly into the dark of the room, and he followed her.
"No fire!" he reproached her, or perhaps himself, for it seemed, in the poignancy of his tenderness, as if he should have had it burning night and day. He set a match to the kindling and the flame answered it. She had taken one of the chairs at the hearth and he saw, in the leaping light, that she had put the child on the couch and covered him. She was shuddering all over, shaking horribly, even her lips, and he went into the bedroom, came back with a blanket and wrapped it about her. She held it close, in that humble way she had of trying to spare him trouble, indeed to make no confusion in the world she found so deranged already. He remembered the chartreuse she had once refused and took it down from the high cupboard, poured a little and set the glass in her shaking hand, and, when the muscles did not answer, put it to her lips.