In a day or two Raven had convinced himself that Dick, firm-lipped, self-controlled, as if he had set himself a task, did not mean to leave him. Raven, half amused, half touched, accommodated his behavior to their closer relation and waited for Dick to disclose himself. He would have been light-heartedly glad of the boy's company if he had found no strangeness in it, no purpose he could not, from point to point, divine. Dick sent for more clothes, and a case came by post. He wrote in his chamber, for an hour or two every morning, and after that, Raven became conscious that the boy was keeping a watchful eye on him. If Raven went up to the hut, Dick was sure to appear there, in ten minutes at the most. Once, after a heavy snow, Raven had the wood road broken out, and Dick looked on in a darkling conjecture. And when Raven, now even to Jerry's wonder, proceeded to break from the hut to the back road, Dick found it not only impossible to restrain himself but wise to speak. They were standing by the hearth in the hut, after Raven had swept it and laid a careful fire. He had worked with all possible haste, for he never was there now without wondering whether she might come. He had been resting in the certainty of Tenney's crippled state, but the wounded foot, he knew, was bettering every day, and with it Tira's security lessened. Jerry's dismissal from the chores had troubled him so much that he had gone up, immediately after, to reason with Tenney. But Tenney was entering the barn door at the moment of his turning into the yard, and Tira, following, stopped an instant and made Raven a little gesture that seemed to him one of hasty dismissal, and he went back home again. "Jack," said Dick, this morning in the hut--it was as if he had to speak--"what are you getting this place ready for, and breaking out the back road? You don't need to come up here, in weather like this. If you do, you've got your snowshoes. What the deuce are you breaking out for?" Raven stood a moment looking down at Tira's fire. It seemed a sacred pile, consecrated to holy use. What would Dick say if he told him the paths had been broken for a woman's flying feet, the fire was laid to warm her when she came here hunted by man's cruelty? Dick was said to have written some very strong verse, but how if he found himself up against life itself? "It's a jolly old place," Raven said, rousing himself out of his musing. "As for breaking out, that's what oxen are for." Dick was looking at him in a manifest concern. It was true affection. The boy might find it difficult to hail him across the interval of years between them, but he did love old Jack, though with the precise measure of patronage due the old. "You know," said Dick, "it worries me like the deuce to see you coming up here like----" He paused as if the matter were too complex to be gone into lightly. "Like what?" Raven asked him.