"No," she said, "any man wouldn't know. Because it's true. That man that come into this house last night an' set down side o' me--an' glad enough he was there happened to be that chair left, same as if I'd left it for him--he's bad all through, an' every man in this township knows it, an' they know how I know it, an' how I found it out." The drops on her forehead had wet the curling rings of her hair and she put up her hand and swept them impatiently away. Her eyes, large in their agonized entreaty, were on Raven's, and he suffered for her as it was when he had seen her at the moments of her flight into the woods. And now he seemed to see, not her alone, but Nan, not a shred of human pathos that had been tossed from hand to hot hand, but something childlike and inviolate. And that was how he let himself speak. "But, dear child," he said, "Tenney knows how faithful you are. He knows if you hadn't loved him you wouldn't have married him. And he knows if you love anybody, you're true through everything." "That's it," she said loudly, in a tone that echoed strangely in the great kitchen. "That's it." He knew what she meant. If she loved the man, she could convince him, mad as he was. But she did not love him. She was merely clinging to him with all the strength of her work-toughened hands. "But talk to him," he insisted. "Show him how well you mean toward him." "I can't," she said. "I never've talked to anybody, long as I lived. I git"--she paused for a word and ended in a dash: "I git all froze up." She sat staring at him, as if her mind were tied into knots, as if she could neither untie them, nor conceive of anybody's doing it. But he could not know just what sort of turmoil was in her nor how it was so strange to her that she felt no mental strength to meet it. In the instinct to talk to him, that new impulse born out of the first human companionship she had ever had, she felt strange troubles within her mind, an anguish of desire, formless and untrained. She was like a child who stretches out arms to something it dearly longs for and finds its fingers will not close on it. She had never, before knowing him, felt the least hunger to express anything that did not lie within the small circle of her little vocabulary. But her mind was waking, stretching itself toward another mind, and suffering from its own impotence. "O God!" she said, in a low tone, and then clapped her hand over her mouth, because she had not meant to speak that name. There came a knock at the door. Instantly the look of life ebbed from her face. It assumed at once its mask of stolid calm. She got up and went to the door and Raven, waiting for her to come back, remembered absently he had heard the clang of bells. Visualizing her face as she had talked to him, trying to understand her at every point, the more as she could not explain herself, he was suddenly and sharply recalled. He heard her voice.