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 d