Billy looked at him quickly, earnestly. "Oh, Jerry, of course there is a God. Don't you know it?"
"No," said the Watermelon. "When a person is happy, they know there is a God; when they are wretched, they say, every one does, 'There is no God.' If there is one, why doesn't He let the miserable wretch realize it instinctively as well as the happy person?"
Billy had never suffered, had never felt the foundations of her world falling around her in ruins, had never cried aloud in anguish, "How long, oh Lord, how long?" She answered from her inexperience, from the faith that had never been tested, "Of course there is a God. Every one knows it, every one prays. Why, if your father was a minister, I should think you would know that there is a God."
"That's the trouble. He was a minister and he lost faith, and when he who should have known, wondered if there was a God, we kids knew there wasn't. I suppose it's the same if a boy finds that his mother has lost her virtue. He thinks there is none."
Billy placed her hand on the bank between them and leaned toward him on her straightened arm. "Poor old Jerry! But if your mother still believed?"
"A mother always believes in God and her worthless sons. It's a part of being a mother, I suppose."
CHAPTER XVI
A THIEF IN THE NIGHT
Billy laughed a low, throaty gurgle, and laid her hand an instant on his sleeve. "Don't you see, she believed in God and she believed in you. You didn't go back on her. Would God?"
The Watermelon did not answer. He was busy with a scene of the long ago. He and the youngest Miss Martin had been engaged in a set-to which hardly savored of brotherly love, and parental authority had separated them and passed judgment.