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Tira carried the baby into the front room and sat down by the window, still holding him. She pushed her chair back until the curtain hid her and, through the narrow strip between curtain and casing, kept her eyes on Tenney. For several minutes after Martin had driven away, he stood there, still as a tree. Then the tree came alive.
"Tira," said Laura, with a tearful and blushing cheek held up to the good spinster's, "kiss me, won't you? you never have."
"No, Tira," he said, "I don't mean that. I mean what you want me to mean. You can't understand what it is to a man to know you're afraid, to know you're in danger and he can't help you. I didn't ask you as I ought. I asked you to come away with me. I ask you again. Come away with me and I'll take you to the best place I know. I'll take you to Nan." He had not guessed he was going to say this.
The chimbly ain't afire?" "No," said Tira. "Mebbe somethin's ketched." She got out of bed, ran into the sitting-room, noiselessly shut the crack of draught, and came back. "Them knots are kinder gummy," she said calmly, and was heartened by the evenness of her voice. "I guess 'twon't roar long."
You'll have to keep an eye on the fire. Don't let it go down entirely. It can get pretty cold." He got up, lighted a candle and went into the bedroom for the blankets. Tira followed him and silently took the pair he gave her, came back to the couch and spread them carefully, not to waken the child. He followed with more and, while she finished arranging her couch, piled wood on the fire.
The irony of that was so innocently piercing that he almost broke into a laugh. Nan was right then. Tira did regard him, if not as an archangel, as something scarcely less authoritative. He turned and went back to the fire, threw on an armful of sticks, and stood looking into the blaze. "What makes you say that?" he asked her. "What makes you think I know?"
"I've got my pen," he told her, "my stylograph." And presently he had put on his coat, bidden her a hasty good-by and was plunging up the slope. Somehow, though the crest of the wave had been reached the night before and that usually, Tira had assured him, meant a following calm, he was certain of seeing her to-day.
"What d'ye s'pose I come home for, this time o' day?" "Why," said Tira, in an innocent good faith, "I s'posed you come back to spy on me." That did take hold of him. He looked at her in an almost childish reproach. Now he put the foot to the ground he had been, though unconsciously, easing it but at the first step winced and his face whitened. "God A'mighty!" Raven heard him mutter, and was glad.
"One thing," said Charlotte, smoothing her apron and looking at him in an anxious interrogation, "what be we goin' to say? "The partridges'll do for the present," said Raven grimly. "He's certainly crazy enough. He said he was shooting partridges. We'll take it at that." Charlotte went on, and he sat thinking. So Tira had chosen not to come.
All to once Miss Jaynes wheeled and spoke to me: 'Well, Miss Tira, says she, 'can I have a dollar from you? 'No, ma'am, says I. 'I supposed not, says she; which would have been sassy in anybody but the parson's wife.
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