"Good? 'Course she was good. Don't I know it? An' she's gone. An'
me--what be I goin' to do?"

Somehow Raven understood that he was not thinking of his desolate house
and lonesome mind, but of himself in relation to the law he had broken
and the woman's heart, broken, too. Grotesquely almost, came to his mind
Tira's grave reminder: "He's a very religious man." And Tenney seemed to
have come, by some path of his own, round to the same thing.

"If there was a God----"

"Oh, yes," Raven threw in, moved by some power outside himself, "there
is a God."

"If there was," said Tenney, "he couldn't forgive me no more'n He could
Cain. There's _that_ on my hands. When there's that----"

He stopped before the vision of the man God had scourged into exile for
the shedding of blood. To Raven there was suddenly a presence beside
them: not a Holy Presence, such as they might well have invoked, but Old
Crow. And he remembered how Old Crow had eased the mind of Billy Jones.

"Tenney," he said, "don't you remember what Tira believed in? She
believed in the Lord Jesus Christ. She believed He could forgive sins."

"Do you believe it?" Tenney hurled at him. "Can He forgive--that?"

Again he stretched out his hands.

"Yes," said Raven. "He can forgive that."

"An' I be," Tenney continued, in his scriptural phrasing, "whiter than
snow?"

Raven found himself halting. There were, behind this vision of the
symbol by which God made Himself manifest to man, reserves of strict
integrities.

"Tenney," he said, "you've killed a child. Your child. You're a
criminal. The only thing you can do to get back among men is to give
yourself up. To the law. And take your medicine."

"O my God!" cried Tenney. "Tell it? Tell that? Bring it up afore judge
an' jury how I thought----"

"Don't tell me what you thought," said Raven sharply. "You've said it
once. You were crazy, and you killed your child."

"An' what if----" he began, and Raven finished for him:

"What if they hang you? We can't go into that. There's your first step.
Give yourself up."

The next instant he was sorry for the brutality of this. But Tenney did
not find it brutal. Strangely it seemed to him a way out, the only way.
He was brooding. Suddenly he looked up.

"You told me," he said, apparently in wonder, "you didn't believe."

What to say? "I believe in God Who is letting me--tenderly, oh, with
such pity for my human foolishness--seize whatever crutch I can to help
you