Tenney sat staring at the words, and his mind told him what a fool he was. That meant the encounter at his gate. He had ignored that. He had been deflected from it simply because he had cut his foot and let himself be drawn off the track of plain testimony by his own pain and helplessness. Was Raven in it, too? Was there a shameless assault of all the men about on Tira's honesty? While he was the dupe of Martin, was Martin Raven's dupe? Did such a woman bring perpetual ruin in her path? This he did not ask himself in such words or indeed through any connected interrogation. It was passion within him, disordered, dim, but horrible to bear. He got up presently, took her scissors, cut out the paragraph and laid it on her basket where her eyes must fall upon it. When he had gone back to his chair, she appeared from the bedroom and went up to him. He did not look at her, but her voice was sweeter, gentler than the song had been, with no defiance in it, and, in spite of him, it moved his sick heart, not to belief in her, or even a momentary rest on her good intent toward him, but to a misery he could hardly face. Every nerve in him cried out in revolt against his lot, his aching love for her, his passion forever unsatisfied because she was not entirely his, the anguish of the atom tossed about in the welter of elemental life. "Isr'el," said she, "there's one thing we forgot when we spoke so to each other as we did a minute ago." She waited, and he looked up at her, and the hunger of his eyes was as moving to her as if, like the child they had fought over, he was himself a child and "not right." "We forgot," she said, in a soft shyness at having to remind him who was a professing Christian of what he knew far better than she, "Who was with us all the time: the Lord Jesus Christ." She turned away from him, in a continued timidity at seeming to preach to him, and seated herself again by the other window. The newspaper clipping arrested her eye. She took it up, read it over slowly, read it again and Tenney watched her. Then she crumpled it in her hand and tossed it on the table. She glanced across at Tenney and spoke gravely, threading her needle with fingers that did not tremble. "That's jest like him," she said. "Anybody 't knew him 'd know 'twas what he'd do. He's hand in glove with Edson that carries on that paper. They go to horse-trots together. He's willin' to call attention to himself, black eye an' all, if he can call attention to somebody else, same time. That's wormwood, too, Isr'el. We're the ones it's meant for, you an' me." XXXI