She would put a hand on his arm and they would walk together while she told him her unvarying tale. When she had knocked persistently, Tira would appear at the chamber window, and shake her head, and her lips seemed to be saying, "No! no! no!" And each time Tenney returned shortly, and they were sure his going was a blind. He never went to the street, and even Charlotte remarked the strangeness of his short absences. "What under the sun makes Isr'el Tenney start out an' turn round an' come back ag'in?" she inquired of Jerry. "He ain't gone twenty minutes 'fore he's home." Jerry didn't know. He "'sposed Isr'el forgot suthin'." How was Tira? Raven asked after Nan had seen her at the window, and she did not spare him. Pale, she said, paler than ever, a shadow of herself. But Nan had faith that her courage would hold. It was like the winter and the spring. Tenney stood for the forces of darkness, but the spring had to come in the end. Also she owned that her great reason for believing in Tira's endurance was that Tira was not alone. She had, like Old Crow, her sustaining symbol. She had, whatever the terrifying circumstance of her daily life, divine companionship. She had her Lord, Jesus Christ. "I believe," said Raven abruptly, one day when they were tramping the snowy road and she was answering the panic of his apprehensive mind, "you swear by Old Crow's book." "I do," said Nan simply, "seem to be hanging on to Old Crow. I've read it over and over. And it does somehow get me. Picture writing! And human beings drawing the lines and half the time not getting them straight! But if there's something to draw, I don't care how bad the drawing is. If there's actually something there! There is, Rookie. Tira's got hold of it because she's pure in heart. It's something real, and it'll see her through." Raven was not content with its seeing her through until he could be told what the appointed end was likely to be. If Tira was to fight this desperate battle all her mortal life, he wasn't to be placated by the rewarding certainty of a heavenly refuge at the end. "I can never," he said, "get over the monstrous queerness of it all. Here's a woman that's got to be saved, and she's so infernally obstinate we can't save her. When I think of it at night, I swear I'm a fool not to complain of the fellow in spite of her, and then in the morning I know it can't be done. She'd block me, and I should only have got her in for something worse than she's in for now." "Yes," said Nan, "she'd block you. Wait, Rookie. Something will happen. Something always does."