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?"