He was religious, she often told herself, chiefly in her puzzled musings after a "spell" was over, and this was the strongest vow she could imagine. But it disconcerted him. "There! there!" he said. "Don't say such things." Evidently the name of God was for Sundays. But he was uneasily reassured. He was, at least, in a way of sense, delighted. He put his face to hers and thickly bade her kiss him. He was not for the moment horrible to her unconsenting will. Rather she found herself rejoicing. When she could escape from him (and she felt no fear, her wild belief in herself was so great) she thought she could dance and sing. For now she knew she did not love him, and it made her feel so free. Always there had been some uneasy bond, first with the man who cajoled her to her heart-break and the miserable certainty that, whatever magic was in a good name, it was hers no more, and then with Tenney, whom she had followed humbly, gratefully, because he had been so kind and told her nothing mattered if she would marry him. But now she felt a sudden snapping of the bond and she knew that, in her mind, at least, in her moments of solitude with the baby, she could dance upon the hills of life. It was an entirely new sense of ecstasy, a thrilling of her blood. She laughed out, a low, excited laugh, and put him from her and called gaily: "You slice the ham, an' I'll git out some eggs." Tenney stared at her a minute, perplexed and wondering. Then his face relaxed slightly. It might have been said he smiled. There was apparently a good feeling in the house, such as he had never been able to create. She had always been kind, conformable, but she had never laughed like this, nor in his sight taken up the baby and tossed him until he, too, laughed gurglingly. She cooked the dinner and Tenney, not able to take himself out of her bewildering presence, hung about and watched her and, when the baby began to fret for food, took him up and walked with him until Tira was free. And while they ate dinner the baby slept again on the lounge: for the cradle, grim witness Tenney could not bring himself to look at now, had been moved into the bedroom. "D'you see that feller jest goin' when you come into the yard?" Tenney asked her, when his first hunger was over and he leaned back in his chair to look at her where she sat, only picking at her food, he thought anxiously. She seemed queer to him to-day, with the rapt, exalted look of one who had seen strange things and been tired by them, the tremulous eloquence of her lips. She was, he owned to himself, yet not with any satisfaction, because any smallest allurement in her lessened his chance of keeping her faith inviolate, a likely looking woman. "I wish," he said irritably, out of his uneasiness over her, "you'd eat suthin.' You're all beat out." She smiled at him. She felt kindly toward him as to a part of the world that had at least begun to show its softer side to her. "No," she said, "I ain't beat out."