"Why?"
"You did not come to supper."
"I often go without supper."
"I heard of your trouble. I wanted to find you and to help you. You found me in the cellar—and helped me."
"And what can you do—what can anyone do for me?" and he turned again to the river. "Look at the darkness. Only that for me."
"But light always follows darkness, Abraham. God has planned it so. Sometimes the night is very dark, and very long, but morning comes. It is always so."
He was silent and they stood together in the gloom.
"God!" he said to himself. "Is there a God? I wonder. If there is a God He knows how hard I've tried—worked against fate itself, how I wanted to be something in the world. I've loved to study about Washington and have been fool enough to dream I might do something for my country some time. But Washington came from a race of cavaliers. I come from the poorest of ten thousand. Washington at the age of twenty-one was an Adjutant General of Virginia with the rank of Major. Abraham Lincoln at twenty-one was driving two yoke of oxen to an emigrant wagon through the mud-holes and wilds of the West and had never been to school a year in his life. I was tryin'. I felt that I was gettin' ahead. Now comes a burden that will crush me to earth—for Ann Rutledge—Ann Rutledge," and he turned toward her and spoke with fierce determination, "every penny of this debt must be paid if it takes me to the day of my death with my coffin money thrown in."
"Yes, Abraham Lincoln," she answered gently, "every penny—and God will help you do it, for God never expects the impossible. He's not that kind of a God, you know."