"I don't see," he said, "how you get up here anyway. You must come by the road? Why doesn't he follow you?"
The slow red surged into her face. She was hesitating. There was evidently worse to come.
"He gits so mad," she said, with frequent pauses between the words, "he don't stay in the house after he's had a spell. I guess he don't dare to. He's afraid of what he'll do. He goes out an' smashes away at the woodpile or suthin.' An' it's then I ketch up the baby an' run. I go out the side door an' up the road a piece an' into the back road. Then I come down the loggin' road the back way an' end up here. It's God's mercy," she said passionately, "they've broke out that loggin' road or there wouldn't be any path an' he'd see my tracks in the snow."
"Then," said Raven, "if he has sense enough to go and work it off on the woodpile, perhaps you aren't in any real danger, after all."
She looked at him piteously. Her eyes narrowed with a frowning return to a scene of terror past and persistently avoided in retrospect.
"'Most always," she said, in a low tone, "it comes on him ag'in, an' then, 'fore you know it, he's back in the house. Once he brought the axe with him. Baby was in the cradle. The cradle head's split right square acrost."
"Good God!" said Raven. "And you won't let me send you away from here?"
"Why, Mr. Raven," said she, and her voice was only less exquisite in its tenderness than when she spoke of the baby, "ain't I married to him?"
They sat looking at each other, and the suffused beauty of her face was so moving to him that he got up and went to the window and stared out at the tree branches in their winter calm. He made himself stand there looking at them and thinking persistently of them, not of her. She would not bear thinking of, this thing of beauty and need and, at the same time, inexorability of endurance. Unless she would let him help her, he was only driving the hot ploughshare of her misery through his own heart for nothing. So he stood there, mechanically studying the trees and remembering how they would wake from this frozen calm on a night when the north wind got at them and made them thrash at one another in the fury of their destiny. Her voice recalled him.