"Very likely it's partly because I am a lawyer's daughter," I said; "but in any case making a will wouldn't have any more terrors for me than writing a check. But then I never had any fear of death anyway."
Deacon Daniel regarded me yet more intently, clasping his great white hands over his knee.
"I never can quite make you out, Miss Ruth," he said after a little. "You haven't any belief in a hereafter that I know of, but you seem to have no trouble about it."
I asked him why I should have, and he answered that most people do.
"Perhaps that is because they feel a responsibility about the future that I don't," I returned. "I don't think I can alter what is to come after death, and I don't see what possible good I can do by fretting about it. Father brought me up, you know, to feel that I had all I could attend to in making the best I can of this life, without wasting my strength in speculating about another. In any case I can't see why I should be any more afraid of death than I am of sleep. I understand one as well as I do the other."
He looked at the rug thoughtfully a moment, and then, as if he declined to be drawn into an argument, he came back to the original subject of our talk.
"Would Tom Webbe want to have anything to do with the child?" he asked.
"I think he would rather forget she is in the world," I told him. "By and by he may be fond of her, but now he tries not to think of her at all. I want to make her so attractive and lovely he can't help caring for her."
"But then she will care for him," the Deacon commented.
"Why, of course she will. That is what I hope. Then she might influence him, and help him."