"She's been good to God all her life; what do you reckon He's letting her die this way for?"
It was a terrible question, made more terrible by the savage hardihood that lay behind it. Ardea could not reason with him; and she felt intuitively that at this crisis only reason would appeal to him. Yet she 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?"