.
"Why, then," she continued, "there wouldn't be anything to fret about,
ever. You never'd be afraid, not if you was killed, you wouldn't. You'd
know there was Somebody in the room."
This was the most deeply considered speech of her whole life. The last
words, ingenuous as a child's unconscious betrayal, tore at him as, he
suddenly thought, it would be if he saw a child tortured and in fear: as
if he saw Nan. They told him how desperately lonesome and undefended she
had felt.
"An' don't you see," she concluded, with the brightness of happy
discovery, "even if you was killed, what harm would it do you? He'd be
waitin'. You'd go with Him. Wherever it is He lives, you'd go."
Raven turned abruptly, walked to a window and stood there looking into
the dark. The challenge of her face was impossible to bear. Suppose she
asked him again if he believed it? Did he believe in a God made man? By
no means. He believed in one God, benevolent, he had once assumed, but
in these latter years too well hidden behind His cloud for man to say.
Did the old story of a miraculous birth and an atonement move him even
to a desire to believe? It repelled him rather? What, to his honest
apprehension, was the God made man? An exemplar, a light upon the path
of duty, as others also had been. Had the world gone wrong, escaped from
its mysterious Maker, and did it need to be redeemed by any such
dramatic remedy? No, his God, the God who made, could not botch a job
and be disconcerted at the continuing bad results of His handiwork. The
only doubt about his God was whether He was in any degree benevolent.
When he reflected that He had made a world full to the brim of its cup
of bitterness, he sometimes, nowadays, thought not. All this swept
through his mind in a race of thoughts that had run on that course
before, and again he heard her and knew she was pulling him back to the
actual issue as it touched herself.
"You tell me," she was calling him. Her voice insisted. He did not turn,
but he knew her face insisted even more commandingly. "You know. There's
nothin' you don't know. Is it true?"
Nothing he didn't know! 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. "Wh
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