it warmed her. She looked up at him,
and what she said was more unexpected than anything he could have
imagined:

"Do you believe it?"

"Believe what?"

He could only guess she meant something connected with Tenney's madness
of suspicion and the devil of a man.

"What he said." She was looking at him with intensity, as if life and
death lay in his answer. "He said He was there to-night, there in the
room. Do you believe that?"

"Who was there?" Raven prompted her, and the immediate reply staggered
him.

"Jesus Christ."

He temporized.

"I've no doubt he believed it," he said, unwilling to speak Tenney's
name. It was doubly hateful to him at the moment of her being so
patently undone. He could only think she was trying to reconcile the
ugly contrast between her husband's expressed faith and his insane
action. "I'm sure he thought so."

"That ain't what I mean," she hesitated, and he began to see how her
mind was striving in an anguish of interrogation. "What he
thinks--that's neither here nor there. What I want to know is whether
it's _so_. If there's Somebody"--she clasped her hands on her knees and
looked up at him, mutely imploring him who was so wise in books and life
to help her striving mind--"if there's Somebody that cares--that died
over it, He cared so much--if He's round here everywhere--if He sees it
all--an' feels terrible, same as we do ourselves--why, then it's
different."

"What's different?" Raven asked, out of his fog.

She was demanding something of him and he felt, in a sickness of
despair, that it was something he couldn't give her because he hadn't it
himself. Tenney could read her the alphabet of comfort, though he was
piling on her those horrors of persecution that made her hungry for it.

"Why," she said, and the light and a bloom of something ineffable swept
over her face, changing its tragic mystery from the somberness of the
Fates to the imagined youthful glory of the angels, "if He's here all
the time, if He's in the room when things happen to us, an' wishes He
could stop it an' can't because"--again her mind labored and she saw she
had come up against the mysterious negatives of destiny--"anyways, He
would if He could--an' He knows how we feel inside when we feel the
worst, an' cares, cares same as----" here she was inarticulate. But she
turned for an instant toward the couch where the child lay, and her face
was the mother face. She meant, he knew, as she cared for her child