"I dunno's I blame him," she said slowly, as if she found it a wearingly difficult matter and meant to be entirely just. "You see he had provocation." The red came flooding into her cheeks. "He come home from work an' what should he see but the man, the one I told you——"
She stopped, and Raven supplied, in what he hoped was an unmoved manner:
"The one that looks up kinder droll?"
For his life he could not have helped repeating the words as she had given them to him. He had found them too poignant in their picturesque drama to be paraphrased or forgotten.
"Yes," she said eagerly. She was relieved to be helped. "He drove up in his sleigh, about fifteen minutes 'fore Isr'el come home. He come up to the house. I went to the door. 'What do you want?' I says. Then he begun to say things, foolish things same's he always did——"
She stumbled there, as if in shame, and Raven knew what kind of things they were: things about her eyes, her lips, insulting things to an honest wife, taunting things, perhaps, touching the past. More and more she seemed to him like a mother of sorrows, a child unjustly scourged into the dark mysteries of passion and pain.
"Never mind," he said reassuringly. "Don't try to tell me. Don't think of them."
But she would tell him. It seemed as if she had to justify herself.
"He told me he wanted to come in. 'You can't,' says I, 'not whilst I live.' An' he laughed an' stood there an' dug his heel into the snow an' waited, kinder watchin' the road till Isr'el hove in sight with his dinner pail. An' then I see it all. He'd drove along that way an' see Isr'el an' Jerry comin' acrost from their work an' he meant to stan' there drivin' me out o' my senses till Isr'el see him. An' soon as he was sure Isr'el did see him, he turned an' run for the sleigh an' got in an' give the hoss a cut, an' he was off same's he meant to be."
"And you were left alone with Tenney," said Raven quietly. "There! don't tell me any more."