Mrs. Davis seemed stupefied; she looked up into those beautiful distressed brown eyes, and her dry lips moved.
"You don't think," she said, in a hoarse, hurried whisper—"you're not saying—Tom isn't in hell?"
"I know he is not, I know it! Justice? it would be the most frightful injustice, because, don't you see," she went on eagerly, "it is just as you said,—Tom had no chance; so God could not punish him eternally for being what he had to be, born as he was, and living as he did. I don't know anything about people's souls when they die,—I mean about going to heaven,—but I do know this: as long as a soul lives it has a chance for goodness, a chance to turn to God. There is no such place as hell!"
"But—but"—the widow faltered, "he was cut off in his sins. The preacher wouldn't say but he was lost!" Her words were a wail of despair.
Helen groaned; she was confronted by her loyalty to John, yet the suffering of this hopeless soul! "Listen," she said, taking Mrs. Davis's hands in hers, and speaking slowly and tenderly, while she held the weak, shifting eyes by her own steady look, "listen. I do not know what the preacher would say, but it is not true that Tom is lost; it is not true that God is cruel and wicked; it is not true that, while Tom's soul lives, he cannot grow good."
The rigid look in the woman's face began to disappear; her hopeless belief was shaken, not through any argument, but by the mere force of the intense conviction shining in Helen's eyes.
"Oh," she said appealingly, and beginning to tremble, "are you true with me, ma'am?"
"I am true, indeed I am!" Helen answered, unconscious that her own tears fell upon Mrs. Davis's hands; the woman looked at her, and suddenly her face began to flush that painful red which comes before violent weeping.
"If you're true, if you're right, then I can be sorry. I wouldn't let myself be sorry while I couldn't have no hope. Oh, I can be that sorry it turns me glad!"
The hardness was all gone now; she broke into a storm of tears, saying between her sobs, "Oh, I'm so glad—I'm so glad!"