Tira went to the telephone in the next room and Raven cleared away the confusion he had made and again Tenney watched him. At intervals he looked down at his bandaged foot as if he pitied it. Tira, having given her message, came back and reported that the doctor would be there shortly. "Then," said Raven, "I'll be off. Telephone if you need anything. Perhaps I'd better come over anyway. He'll have to be got to bed. I'll call you up." He felt a sudden easement of the strain between himself and Tira. Tenney himself, through his hurt, had cleared the way. Their intercourse, void of secrecy, was suddenly commonplace; at the moment there was nothing in it to light a flash of feeling. Tenney did not look at him. Then Raven, in a sudden mounting of desire to show Tira how sorry he was for her, said to her impetuously: "I hate to leave you alone." And again she surprised him as she had the night before in implicit acceptance of her new faith, something as tangible as divine. She spoke in a perfect simplicity. "I ain't alone," she said. Tenney had turned his head, to listen. "We ain't alone, Isr'el, be we?" she challenged breathlessly. "I dunno what you're talkin' about," said Tenney uneasily, and she laughed. It was, Raven wonderingly thought, a light-hearted laugh, as if she had no longer anything to bear. "Why," said she, "same as I told you. We ain't alone a minute o' the time, if we don't feel to be. He's with us, the Lord Jesus Christ." The telephone bell rang and she went off to answer it. Tenney, as if with a hopeful conviction that another man would understand, turned his eyes upon Raven. "What's anybody want to talk like that for?" he questioned irrepressibly. "It's the way you talk yourself," said Raven. "That's precisely what you said last night." "It's no kind of a way----" Tenney began, and then pulled himself up. Raven believed that he meant it was one thing to invoke the Founder of his religion in a sacerdotal sense, but not for the comforting certainty of a real Presence. "Seems if anybody's crazed. Seems if----" Here he broke off again, and Raven took satisfaction in the concluding phrase: "It's no way to talk when a man's lamed himself so's't he can't git round the room 'thout bleedin' to death." By this Raven understood the man was, in an hysterical way, afraid of Tira and her surprising invocation. He judged things were looking rather better for her, and went off almost cheerfully, without waiting for her return. XXVI When Raven came to Nan's, he went in without knocking and found the house still. He called her name, and she answered from an upper distance. Presently she appeared, traveling bag in hand, and came down to him. "You really want me, Rookie?" she asked him, pausing at the closet door where she had hung her hat and coat. "You want an unattached female, unchaperoned, very much at large?"