What could he say? Old Crow had besought him, too, to abandon fear in the certainty of a safe universe speaking through the symbols man could understand. He tried to summon something that would reach and move her. "What if I were drowning," he said. "Suppose I knew I should"--he sought for the accepted phrase--"go to heaven, if I drowned. Do you think I should be right in not trying to save myself?" Tira knit her brows. It was only for an instant, though. "No," she said. "Certain you'd have to save yourself. You'd have to try every way you knew. That's what I've done. I'm tryin' every way I know." "I'm telling you another way," said Raven sharply. "I'm telling you you can't live with a crazy man----" "Oh, no," she interrupted earnestly. "He ain't that. He has spells, that's all." "I'm not even asking you to go away with me. I'm asking you to go with that good woman over there." Somehow he felt this was more appealing than the name of Nan. "I trust her as I do myself, more than myself. It's to save your life, Tira, your life and the baby's life." She was looking at him out of eyes warm with the whole force of her worshiping love and gratitude. "No," she said softly. "I can't go. I ain't got a word to say ag'inst her," she added eagerly. "She's terrible good. Anybody could see that. But I can't talk to folks. I can't let 'em know. Not anybody," she added softly, as if to herself, "but you." Raven forbade himself to be moved by this. "Then," he said, "you'll have to talk to other folks you may not like so well. I shall complain of him. I shall be a witness to what I've seen and what you've told me. I've threatened you with that before, but now it's got to be done." "No," said Tira, trying, he could see, through every fiber of will in her to influence him. But never by her beauty: she was game there. "You wouldn't tell what I've said to you. You couldn't. 'Twas said to you an' nobody else. It couldn't ha' been said to anybody else on this livin' earth." Here was a spark of passion, as if she struck it out unknowingly. But he must not be moved, and by every means he would move her. "What is there," he said, in the roughness of an emotion she saw plainly, "what is there I wouldn't do to save your life? To save you from being knocked about, touched"--he was about to add "violated," the purity of her seemed so virginal, but he stopped and she went on: "It's just as I told you before. If they asked me questions, I should say 'twa'n't so. I should say you thought 'twas so, but 'twa'n't. I should say you wrote books an' you got up things, I guessed. It made you wrong in your head." Old Crow! The innocent observers of his life and Old Crow's were in a mysterious conspiracy to prove them both unsound. He laughed out suddenly and she looked at him, surprised.