"No, he ain't," said she indignantly. "Baby's light complected. You see he is. An' I'm dark an' so's Mr. Tenney. An' I told him--I told him about me before we were married, an' he thought he could stand it then. But we went over to the county fair an' he see--_him_. He come up an' spoke to him, that man did, spoke to us both, an' Mr. Tenney looked at him as if he never meant to forgit him, an' he ain't forgot him, not a minute since. He's light complected, blue eyes an' all. An' he stood there, that man did, talkin' to us, kinder laughin' an' bein' funny, an' all to scare me out o' my life for fear o' what he'd say. He didn't say a word he hadn't ought to, an' when he'd had his joke he walked off. But he had just that way o' lookin' up kinder droll, an' baby's got it. Mr. Raven, for God's sake tell me why my baby's got to look like that man?" She was shaking him into a passion as unendurable as her own. He had never felt such pity for any human being, not even the men blinded and broken in the War. And he understood her now. Even through his belief in her, that sudden belief born of her beauty and her extremity, he had been amazed at her accepting him so absolutely. Now he saw. He was her last hope and perhaps because he was different from the neighbors to whom she could not speak, she was throwing herself into the arms of his compassion. And she had to hurry lest she might not see him again. He sat there, his hands clenched between his knees, his head bent. He must not look at her. "Poor chap!" he said finally, his altered thoughts now on Tenney. "He's jealous." She broke into a sob that seemed to rend her and then pulled herself up and sat silent. But he could see, from her shadowy outline through his oblique vision, that she was shaking horribly. "Can't you," he said, "make him understand, make him see how--how tremendously you love him?" That was pretty mawkish, he thought, as he said it, but he meant it, he meant volumes more. Flood the man with kindness, open the doors of her beauty and let him see how really incorruptible she was, how loyal, how wronged. For, with every minute of her company, he was the more convinced of her inviolate self. Whatever the self had been through, now it was motherhood incarnate. What was she saying to this last? "Be nice to him?" she asked, "that kind o' way?" And he saw, as she did, that he had meant her to drown the man's jealous passion in passion of her own. "He thinks," she said bitterly, "that's the kind o' woman I am." Then he looked with her upon the barricaded road of her endeavor.