"Why, yes, you have," said she. "Isr'el Tenney chased his woman up into the woods with an axe. An' you heard him yellin' after her. That's God's truth."
Raven felt rising in him the rage of the natural man, a passion of protection for the woman who is invincibly beautiful yet physically weak.
"An'," she went on, "you might ha' seen him out there, axe an' all."
"Oh," said Raven, as if it were of no great account, "I did see him."
"O my soul!" she breathed. "You see him? I'm glad you come in. He might ha' asked you if you'd seen me."
This was a new terror and she was undone.
"How'd you do it?" she asked breathlessly. "You must ha' put it better'n I could or he'd be here now."
"I didn't 'put it,'" said Raven, easily. "I lied, and he went off down the hill."
Extravagant as it seemed, he did get an impression, like a flash, that she was disappointed in him because he had lied. But this was no time for casuistry. There were steps to be taken.
"You won't go back to him," he said, and said it definitively as if it were a matter he had thought out, said it like a command.
"Not go back to him?" she repeated. "Why, I've got to go back to him. I've got to go home. Where do you expect I'm goin', if I don't go home?"
"Haven't you any people?" Raven asked her. "Can't you go to them?"
She laughed a little, softly, showing fine white teeth. The spell of her beauty was moving to him. He might never, he thought, have noticed her at all in other circumstances, if he had not seen her there in the woods and felt her need knock at his heart with the imperative summons of the outraged maternal. Was this the feeling rising in him that had made his mother's servitude to his father so sickening in those years gone by? Was the old string still throbbing? Did it need but a woman's hand to play upon it? And yet must he not have noted her, wherever they had met? Would not any man?
"I've got four brothers," she said. "They'd laugh at me. They'd tell me I'd married well an' got a better home than any of them could scrape together if they begun at the beginnin' an' lived their lives over. There's nothin' in Isr'el Tenney to be afraid of, they'd tell me. And there ain't--for them."
"No," said Raven quietly. He felt an intense desire to feel his way, make no mistakes, run no risk of shutting off her confidence. "It's a different thing for you."
