"Oh," said Tira, with a movement of her eloquent hands, as if she tossed away something that hindered her, "tain't no matter about me. I've got to stay here. Mr. Raven"--her voice appealed to him sweetly. He remembered she had not so used his name before--"I told you that. I can't leave him." The last word she accented slightly, and Raven could not tell whether the stress on it was the tenderness of affection, or something as moving, yet austere. And now he had to know. "You want to stay with him"----he began, and Tira interrupted him softly, looking at him meantime, as if she besought him to understand: "I promised to." Raven sat there and looked into the fire, thinking desperately. At that moment, he wanted nothing in the world so much as to snatch her away from Tenney and set her feet in a safe place. But did he want it solely for her or partly for himself? What did it matter? Casuistry was far outside the tumult of desire. He would kick over anything, law or gospel, to keep her from going back there this night. Yet he spoke quietly: "We'll go up and get the baby, and I'll call Charlotte, and you'll stay here to-night. To-morrow we'll go." "No," said Tira, gently but immovably, "I couldn't have Charlotte an' Jerry brought into it. Not anyways in the world." "Why not?" asked Raven. "I couldn't," she said. "They're neighbors. They're terrible nice folks, but folks have to talk--they can't help it--an', 'fore you knew it, it'd be all over the neighborhood. An' he's a professin' Christian. 'Twould be terrible for him." Sometimes he only knew from the tone of her voice, in this general vagueness of expecting him to understand her, whether she meant Tenney or the child. "What I thought was," she went on timidly, "if she'd come an' git him"--and here "him" evidently meant the child--"'twould be reasonable she was takin' him back where he could be brought up right. She'd just as soon do it," she assured him earnestly, as if he had no part in Nan. "Some folks are like that. They're so good." He was insatiate in his desire to understand her. "And you mean," he said, with a directness he was willing to tincture with a cruelty sharp enough to serve, "to send the child off somewhere where he will be safe, and then live here with this brute, have more children by him----" "No! no!" she cried sharply. "Not that! don't you say that to me. I can't bear it. Not from you! My God help me! not from you."