“She’s been good to God all her life; what do you reckon He’s letting her die this way for?”

It was a terrible question, made more terrible by the savage hardihood that lay behind it.  Ardea could not reason with him; and she felt intuitively that at this crisis only reason would appeal to him.  Yet she could not turn him away empty-handed in his hour of need.

“How can we tell?” she said, and there were tears in her voice.  “We only know that He does everything for the best.”

“Yes; that is what they tell us.  But how are we going to know?” he demanded.

The girl’s faith was as simple and confiding as it was defenseless under any fire of argument.

“I suppose we can’t know, in your sense of the word.  But we can believe.”

“I can’t,” said Tom fiercely.  “I can pretend to; I reckon I’ve been pretending to all my life; but now I’ve got to a place where I can’t feel anything that I can’t touch, nor hear anything that doesn’t make a noise, nor see anything that everybody else can’t see.  From what you’ve said at different times, you seem to be able to do all these things.  Do you really believe?”

“I hope I do,” she answered, and her voice was low and very earnest.  But she would be altogether honest.  “Perhaps you wouldn’t call it ’belief unto righteousness,’ as your Uncle Silas would say.  I’ve never thought much about such things—­in the way he says we ought to think about them.  They seem to me to be true, like the—­well, like the stars and the universe.  You don’t think about the universe all the time; but you know it is there, and that you are a little, tiny fraction of it, yourself.”

But these were abstractions, and Tom’s need was terribly concrete.

“I suppose you mean you haven’t been converted, and all that; never mind about that.  What I want to know is, did you ever ask God for anything and get it?”

“Why, yes; I ask Him for things every day, and get them.  Don’t you?”

“No, not now.  But are you sure the things you ask for are not things that you’d get anyway?” he persisted.

She was growing a little restive under the fire of relentless questions.  There are modesties in religion as in morals,—­inner shrines to be defended at any and all costs.  In the Crafts part of Thomas Jefferson’s veins ran the blood of those who had fought with the sword in one hand and the Bible in the other, stabling their horses overnight in the enemy’s churches.  Ardea rose and began to untangle the great bunch of holly.

“I think we had better be going,” she said, ignoring his clenching question.  “Cousin Euphrasia gets nervous about me, sometimes, as you made believe you were.”

He did not look around, or make any move toward getting up.  But there was a new note of hardness in his voice when he said:  “I thought you’d have to dodge, just like all the others, if I could only make out to throw straight enough.  ’Way down deep inside of you, you don’t believe God worries Himself much about what happens to us little dry leaves in His big woods.”