"I tell you," he said, "a man don't know what to do. There was that—that—what I done it to—he wa'n't mine."
He looked at Raven in a hunger of supplication. He was almost dying to be denied.
"Yes," said Raven steadily. "He was yours."
"How do you know?" shrieked Tenney, as if he had caught him. "She talk things over?"
Raven considered. What could he say to him?
"Tenney," he said at last, "you haven't understood. You haven't seen her as she was, the best woman, the most beautiful——"
Here he stopped, and Tenney threw in angrily, as if it were a part of his quarrel with her:
"She was likely enough. But what made her," he continued violently, "what made her let a man feel as if her mind was somewheres else? Where was her mind?"
That was it, Raven told himself. Beauty! it promised ineffable things, even to these eyes of jealous greed, and it could not fulfil the promise because everything it whispered of lay in the upper heavens, not on earth. But Tenney would not have heard the answer even if Raven could have made it. He was broken. He bent his head into his hands and sobbed aloud.
"Good? 'Course she was good. Don't I know it? An' she's gone. An' me—what be I goin' to do?"