"Well," said Raven, in a futile reassurance, "perhaps he thinks he's left it somewhere, and if he doesn't particularly need it—Jerry told me only this morning the doctor said he might as well be getting used to a cane."
"No," said Tira conclusively, "he don't think he's left it anywheres. He's keepin' still, that's all."
Immediately Raven saw the menacing significance of Tenney's keeping still. His mind ran with a quick foot over the imprisonment of the two there together. Was there a moment, he wondered, when the suffering brute was not threatening to her, when her heart could rest itself for the next hurried flight? He ventured his question.
"Has he been"—he hesitated for a word and found what sounded to him a mawkish one—"good to you at all, these last weeks?"
Tira reflected a moment and then, for the first time since she came in from the cold, the blood rushed to her haggard cheeks. She remembered a moment, the day before the burning of the crutch, when he had found her doing her hair before the bedroom glass and had caught her to him wildly. She had put him away from her, though gently, because his violence, whether it took the form of starved passion or raging hate, always seemed to her the unbecoming riot of a forward child, and he had left her in a shamefaced anger, a grumbling attempt to recover his lost dignity. Tira hid even from herself the miserable secrets of marital savagery. No sacrifice was too great to hide from Tenney her knowledge of his abasement. Most of all must she hide it from another man, and that man Raven. Her answer was not ready, but she had it for him, and he understood, in his unfailing knowledge of her, that it was the first crooked one she had ever given him, and for the first time he felt anger toward her. She was defending her enemy, and against him.
"He does the best he can," she said. "He takes things terrible hard. I dunno's I ever see anybody that took 'em so hard."
Then, as he did not speak, she looked at him and meeting the cold unresponsiveness in his face her composure broke and she stretched out her hands to him in a wildness of entreaty.
"Oh, don't you look like that," she cried. "If you turn from me 'twill be my death."
He was not cold now. He bent to her and took her hands in his.
"Tira," he said, "come away with me. You can't bear this any longer. Take the child and come. You'd be safe. You'd be happy, if you weren't afraid. Don't go back there for another minute. Stay here over night, and to-morrow I'll take you away."