Nan, glancing at Tira, caught the tremor that went over her and understood this was, in a veiled way, a threat. She came, at a leap, to the purpose of her call. "Mr. Tenney," she said, "I'm an awfully interfering person. I've come to ask you and your wife to let me do something." Tenney was staring at her with lacklustre eyes. In these latter days, the old mad spark in them had gone. "Your baby," said Nan, feeling her heart beat hard, "isn't right. I know places where such poor little children are made--right--if they can be. They're studied and looked after. I want you to let me take him away with me and see if something can be done. His mother could go, too, if she likes. You could go. Only, I'll be responsible. I'll arrange it all." Tenney still stared at her, and she found the dull gaze disconcerting. "So," he said at length, not even glancing at Tira, "so she's put that into your head." "So far as that goes," said Nan boldly, "I've put it into hers. I saw he wasn't right. I told her I'd do everything in my power, in anybody's power, to have him"--she hesitated here for a homely word he might take in--"seen to. And now (you're his father) I've come to you." Tenney sat a long time, motionless, his eyes on the window at the end of the room where a woodbine spray was tapping, and again Nan became conscious of the increased tremor in Tira's frame. For now it seemed to have run over her and strangely to keep time to the woodbine spray outside. One would have said the woodbine, looking in, had, in a mad, irritating way, made itself the reflex of these human emotions within the room. Tenney spoke, drily yet without emphasis: "Then he put ye up to this?" "Who?" asked Nan. For some obscure reason he would not mention Raven's name. But he spoke with a mildness of courtesy surprising to her and evidently the more alarming to Tira, for she shook the more and the vine appallingly knew and kept her company. "I'm obleeged to ye," said Tenney. "But I don't want nothin' done for me nor mine. He's mine, ye see. He's in there asleep"--he pointed to the open bedroom door--"an' asleep or awake, he's mine, same's any man's property is his. An' if he ain't right, he ain't, an' I know why, an' it's the will o' the Lord, an' the Lord's will is goin' to be fulfilled now an' forever after, amen!" The tang of scripture phrasing led him further to the channel his mind was always fumbling for. "Do you," he asked Nan, not with any great show of fervor, but as if this were his appointed task, "do you believe on the Lord Jesus Christ yet? Be ye saved?"