Raven answered cheerfully:
"I took a notion."
Then he and Dick went in to breakfast, and Nan's name was not mentioned. Charlotte, Raven concluded, had told the boy she was gone. He seemed to detect in Dick some watchful kindness toward himself, the responsible care attendants manifest toward the incapable. Dick was, he concluded, bent on therapeutic measures.
XXX
Tira, from the forenoon of Tenney's accident, entered on uneventful days. He lowered over his helplessness; he was angry with it. But the anger was not against her, and she could bear it. For the first time she saw his activities fettered, and the mother in her answered. She ventured no outspoken sympathy, but he was dependent on her and in that, much as it chafed him, she found solace. He was chained to his chair, his wounded foot on a rest, and he had no diversions. Tira sometimes wondered what he was thinking when he sat looking out at the road, smooth with the grinding of sleds and slipping of sleighs. Once she brought the Bible and laid it before him on a stand. If its exposition was so precious to him at evening meeting, there would be comfort in it now. But he glanced at her in what looked like a quick suspicion—did it mean he thought she meant to taunt him with the unreality of his faith?—and, after it had lain there a forenoon untouched, he said to her uneasily:
"You put that away."
She took it back to its place on the parlor stand under Grandsir Tenney's hatchet-faced photograph, wondering in her heart why it was not what she had heard them read of God: "A very present help in time of trouble." If you knew it was so, Tira reasoned, you never had to fret yourself any more. And if that place was waiting for you—the good place they talked about—even a long lifetime was not too much to face before you got to it. After she had laid the book down and turned away from it to cross the ordered stillness of the room, she stopped, with a sudden hungry impulse, and opened it at random. "Let not your heart be troubled," she read, and closed it again, quickly lest the next words qualify so rich a message. It might say further on that you were not to be troubled if you fulfilled the law and gospel, and that, she knew, was only fair. But in her dearth she wanted no sacerdotal bargaining. She needed the heavens to rain down plenty while she held out her hands to take. When she entered the kitchen again Tenney, glancing round at her, saw the change in her look. She was flushed, her mouth was tremulous, and her eyes humid. He wondered, out of his ready suspicion, whether she had seen anyone going by.
"What's the matter?" he asked sharply.
"Nothin's the matter," she answered. But her hands were trembling. She was like Mary when she had seen her Lord.