Raven laughed jarringly. It did seem to him grimly amusing to be dallying thus with a man's fears. He was not used to playing games with the human creature's destiny. He had always looked too seriously on all such drama, perhaps because he had been so perplexed by drama of his own. If his life was too puzzling a thing to be endured, was not all life, perhaps, equally puzzling and therefore too delicate a matter to be meddled with? But now the game was on, the game of sheer diplomacy. The straight and obvious path wouldn't do if he was to save a woman who handicapped him in advance by refusing to let herself be saved.
"The night?" he repeated. "Who's out in it? Why, I'm out in it myself; at least, I have been. But now I'm here by this stove, I don't know when you'll get rid of me. Put in a stick, won't you, Tenney? These big rooms have a way of cooling off before you know it."
Tenney did put in a stick and more. He crammed the stove with light stuff and opened draughts. Raven noted, in the keen way his mind had taken up, of snatching at each least bit of safety for the woman, that the tea kettle was boiling. She would be chilled. She would need hot water. And suddenly he felt the blood in his face. There was a hand at the latch of the side door. Tenney, too, heard it. He threw back into the box the stick of wood he had selected and made three strides to the entry. Again he called, in that voice of sharp anxiety:
"That you?"
She opened the door just before he could put out his hand to it, passed him without a look, and came in. He shut the door and followed her. Raven got up from his chair and stood, glancing at her with what he hoped was a casual attention. Tenney came back and, when she had thrown off the blanket, took it from her hand and dropped it on a chair. He was all trembling eagerness. That act, the relieving her of the blanket, was incredible to Raven. The man had wanted to kill her (or, at the least, to kill his child), and he was humbly inducting her into the comforts of her home. She had not looked toward Raven. With a decorum finer, he thought, than his own, she would not play the game of diplomacy. She knew him and she could not deny him, even to save her life. Suddenly Tenney, brushing past to draw up a chair for her at the stove, became aware of him. Raven believed that, up to the moment, he had, to the man's absorbed gaze, been invisible. Now Tenney seemed to recognize the decencies toward even an unbidden guest.
"She's all beat out," he said, in uncouth apology. "It's my woman."
Raven turned to her, waiting for her cue. Would she take a hand at the game, as it imposed itself on him? Her silence and aloofness were his answer. She was sitting forward in her chair, to get the baby's feet nearer the warmth. But since she would not speak, Raven did.
"I should think any one would be beat out, a night like this," he said, as casually as he could manage, "carrying a baby, too, in such a storm. You'd better be careful of the child, at least," he added curtly, turning to Tenney, "if you want to keep him. Out in this cold and sleet! You don't want their deaths on your hands, do you?"
Tenney stared back at him in a wildness of apprehension.
"Be you a doctor?" he managed to ask.