"Why, yes," said Raven. "Didn't you see me hold it up to you?" Tenney nodded, frowning. He seemed to conclude he was giving himself away, showing more interest in the stranger than the stranger had in any way earned. But he asked another question. It leaped from him. He had to ask it. "D'you see anybody up round there after I come down?" Raven shook his head, looking, he hoped, vague. "I came down myself," he said. "I had to talk with Jerry about his thinning out." The eagerness faded from Tenney's face. "I didn't see Jerry up there this mornin'," he volunteered, in an indifferent contribution toward the talk. "No," said Raven. "You won't see him up there at all after this--for a spell, that is. I write, you know, books. I like to go up to the hut to work. Not so likely to be interrupted there. I don't want chopping going on." Tenney, with a quick lift of the head, looked at him questioningly. Raven saw anger also in the look, at last anger ready to spring. Both men had the same thought. Tenney wondered if the owner of the wood was going to taunt him again with yelling like a catamount, and Raven did actually put aside an impulse toward it. "D'you come over here to forbid my goin' up in your woods?" Tenney inquired. "No," said Raven. "I came to ask you if you could help Jerry do some thinning out in the river pasture. I'm rather in a hurry about that." "Why, yes," Tenney began. Then he added breathlessly, as if another part of his mind (the suffering, uncontrolled part) broke in on his speech: "Not yet, though. I can't do anything yet, not till I see how things turn." Raven thought he understood. Tenney could settle to nothing until he knew when his wife was coming back or whether she was coming at all. Now that the vision of her had entered on their stage, he was conscious of answering coldly: "All right. You can make up your mind and go over and see Jerry. He'll arrange it with you." On these words, he was about turning away, when he found Tenney suddenly oblivious of him. The man's thin face was quivering into a pathetic disorder, flushed, quite beyond his control. He neither heard Raven nor saw him, though he did speak brokenly: "There!" he said. "There she is now."