"That's the way it looks to me now. I told you the other day that I didn't know what I believed and what I didn't believe. But I do know some of the don'ts. For instance: if there is a hell—and I'm not anyways convinced that there is—I don't believe—but what's the use of cataloguing it? They'd ask me a string of questions when I was ordained, and I'd have to lie like Ananias."
She rose and met his gloomy eyes fairly.
"Tom Gordon, if you should do that, you would be the wickedest thing alive—the basest thing that ever breathed!"
"That's about the way it strikes me," he said coolly. "So you see it comes down to a case of big wicked or little wicked; it's been that way all along. Did you know that one time I asked God to kill you?"
She looked horrified, as was her undoubted right.
"Why, of all things!" she gasped.
"It's so. I took a notion that I'd be mad because your grandfather brought you here to Paradise. And when you took sick—well, I reckon there isn't any hell deeper or hotter than the one I frizzled in for about four days that summer."
It was too deep in the past to be tragic, and she laughed.
"I used to think then that you were the worst, as well as the queerest, boy I had ever seen."
"And now you know it," he said. Then: "What's your rush? I'm not trying to get rid of you now."