Waiting there at the door, he had time to note the stillness of the woods, the creak of a branch now and then, and the half-drawn sigh from the breeze you hardly felt. At the instant of his beginning to wonder whether she might have fallen there from a hurt or whether she was even terrified of him, he heard the sound of the key and the door opened. He stepped in and her hand was at once on the key. She turned it and melted noiselessly into the dark of the room, and he followed her.
"No fire!" he reproached her, or perhaps himself, for it seemed, in the poignancy of his tenderness, as if he should have had it burning night and day. He set a match to the kindling and the flame answered it. She had taken one of the chairs at the hearth and he saw, in the leaping light, that she had put the child on the couch and covered him. She was shuddering all over, shaking horribly, even her lips, and he went into the bedroom, came back with a blanket and wrapped it about her. She held it close, in that humble way she had of trying to spare him trouble, indeed to make no confusion in the world she found so deranged already. He remembered the chartreuse she had once refused and took it down from the high cupboard, poured a little and set the glass in her shaking hand, and, when the muscles did not answer, put it to her lips.
"It won't hurt you," he said. "Down it."
She drank, and the kindly fire of it warmed her. She looked up at him, and what she said was more unexpected than anything he could have imagined:
"Do you believe it?"
"Believe what?"
He could only guess she meant something connected with Tenney's madness of suspicion and the devil of a man.
"What he said." She was looking at him with intensity, as if life and death lay in his answer. "He said He was there to-night, there in the room. Do you believe that?"
"Who was there?" Raven prompted her, and the immediate reply staggered him.
"Jesus Christ."