"Why, yes; I ask Him for things every day, and get them. Don't you?"
"No, not now. But are you sure the things you ask for are not things that you'd get anyway?" he persisted.
She was growing a little restive under the fire of relentless questions. There are modesties in religion as in morals,—inner shrines to be defended at any and all costs. In the Crafts part of Thomas Jefferson's veins ran the blood of those who had fought with the sword in one hand and the Bible in the other, stabling their horses overnight in the enemy's churches. Ardea rose and began to untangle the great bunch of holly.
"I think we had better be going," she said, ignoring his clenching question. "Cousin Euphrasia gets nervous about me, sometimes, as you made believe you were."
He did not look around, or make any move toward getting up. But there was a new note of hardness in his voice when he said: "I thought you'd have to dodge, just like all the others, if I could only make out to throw straight enough. 'Way down deep inside of you, you don't believe God worries Himself much about what happens to us little dry leaves in His big woods."
"Oh, but I do!—that is, I believe He cares. The things you spoke of are things I might easily be deprived of; and I choose to believe that He gives and continues them."
He was quiet for a full minute, sitting with his knees drawn up to his chin and his hands tightly clasped over them. When he looked up at her his face was the face of one tormented.
"I wish you'd ask Him to let my mother live!" he said brokenly. "I've tried and tried, and the words just die in my mouth."
There is a Mother of Sorrows in every womanly heart, to whom the appeal of the stricken is never made in vain. Ardea saw only a boy-brother crying out in his pain, and she dropped on her knees and put her arms around his neck and wept over him in a pure transport of sisterly sympathy.
"Indeed and indeed I will help, Tom! And you mustn't let it drive you out into the dark. You poor boy! I know just how it hurts, and I'm so sorry for you!"