Milly was badly shaken. She looked, her strained eyes and mouth compressed, as if not only was she robbed of the desire of sleep, but had sworn never, in her distrust of what life could do to her, to sleep again. But she had not appeared, and as Raven sat there waiting for her, Charlotte came down the stairs and glanced in, a comprehensive look at the light, the fire, and at him, as if to assure him, whatever the need in the sick room, she kept him also in mind. Raven signed to her and she nodded. He had a question to ask. It had alternated in his mind with queer little heart-beats of alarm about Dick: hemorrhage, shock, hemorrhage--recurrent beats of prophetic disaster. "Have you seen Tira?" he asked. "I told her to come here and stay till we could get her off somewhere." Then he remembered that, so wide-reaching did Charlotte always seem to him in her knowledge of the life about her, he had not explained why Tira must be got out of the way, and that also was before him. But in her amazing habit of knowing, she knew. "No," she said, "she ain't b'en near. She won't leave Tenney. She's one o' them that sticks by." Immediately he was curious to hear what she had imagined, how she knew. Was the neighborhood awake to even the most obscure local drama? While Tira thought she was, at the expense of her own safety, covering Tenney's wildness of jealousy, were they all walking in the sun? "Who told you?" he asked her. "Why, nobody," said Charlotte. "It didn't take no tellin'. Jerry heard him hollerin' after her that day you was up in the woods, an' when you kep' the loggin' road broke, I knew you was givin' her some kind of a hole to creep into." So they had known, she and Jerry. But they had not told. They would never tell. "One thing," said Charlotte, smoothing her apron and looking at him in an anxious interrogation, "what be we goin' to say? That was the first thing doctor asked: 'Who done it?' (You know I let him in.) ''Twas a poor crazed creatur,' says I, 'after pa'tridges.' I was goin' to say Dick had a gun an' tripped up over a root; but that never'd do in the world, shot in the back so." "The partridges'll do for the present," said Raven grimly. "He's certainly crazy enough. He said he was shooting partridges. We'll take it at that."