“O Tom!—­and she will get well again?”

“She has more chances to-day of getting well than she had last night of dying—­so the doctor says.  But it’s a miracle, just the same.”

“I’m so glad!  And now I really must go home.”  And she got up.

“No, sit down; I’m not through with you yet.  I want to know what you think about promises.”

She smiled and pushed her chair back from the soft-coal blaze in the fireplace.

“Don’t you know you are a perfect ‘old man of the sea,’ Tom?”

“That’s all right; but tell me:  is a bad promise better broken or kept?”

“I am sure I couldn’t say without knowing the circumstances.  Tell me all about it,” and she resigned herself to listen.

“It was at daybreak this morning.  I was alone with mother, looking at her lying there so still and helpless—­dead, all but the little flicker of breath that seemed just about ready to go out.  It came over me all of a sudden that I couldn’t disappoint her, living or dead; that I’d have to go on and be what she has always wanted me to be.  And I promised her.”

“But she couldn’t hear you?”

“No; it was before she came to herself.  Nobody heard me but God; and I reckon He wasn’t paying much attention to anything I said.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because—­well, because it wasn’t the kind of a promise that makes the angels glad.  I said I’d go on and do it, if I had to be a hypocrite all the rest of my life.”

“O Tom! would you have to be?”

“That’s the way it looks to me now.  I told you the other day that I didn’t know what I believed and what I didn’t believe.  But I do know some of the don’ts.  For instance:  if there is a hell—­and I’m not anyways convinced that there is—­I don’t believe—­but what’s the use of cataloguing it?  They’d ask me a string of questions when I was ordained, and I’d have to lie like Ananias.”

She rose and met his gloomy eyes fairly.

“Tom Gordon, if you should do that, you would be the wickedest thing alive—­the basest thing that ever breathed!”

“That’s about the way it strikes me,” he said coolly.  “So you see it comes down to a case of big wicked or little wicked; it’s been that way all along.  Did you know that one time I asked God to kill you?”

She looked horrified, as was her undoubted right.

“Why, of all things!” she gasped.

“It’s so.  I took a notion that I’d be mad because your grandfather brought you here to Paradise.  And when you took sick—­well, I reckon there isn’t any hell deeper or hotter than the one I frizzled in for about four days that summer.”

It was too deep in the past to be tragic, and she laughed.

“I used to think then that you were the worst, as well as the queerest, boy I had ever seen.”

“And now you know it,” he said.  Then:  “What’s your rush?  I’m not trying to get rid of you now.”