"That ain't what I mean," she hesitated, and he began to see how her mind was striving in an anguish of interrogation. "What he thinks--that's neither here nor there. What I want to know is whether it's _so_. If there's Somebody"--she clasped her hands on her knees and looked up at him, mutely imploring him who was so wise in books and life to help her striving mind--"if there's Somebody that cares--that died over it, He cared so much--if He's round here everywhere--if He sees it all--an' feels terrible, same as we do ourselves--why, then it's different." "What's different?" Raven asked, out of his fog. She was demanding something of him and he felt, in a sickness of despair, that it was something he couldn't give her because he hadn't it himself. Tenney could read her the alphabet of comfort, though he was piling on her those horrors of persecution that made her hungry for it. "Why," she said, and the light and a bloom of something ineffable swept over her face, changing its tragic mystery from the somberness of the Fates to the imagined youthful glory of the angels, "if He's here all the time, if He's in the room when things happen to us, an' wishes He could stop it an' can't because"--again her mind labored and she saw she had come up against the mysterious negatives of destiny--"anyways, He would if He could--an' He knows how we feel inside when we feel the worst, an' cares, cares same as----" here she was inarticulate. But she turned for an instant toward the couch where the child lay, and her face was the mother face. She meant, he knew, as she cared for her child. "Why, then," she continued, "there wouldn't be anything to fret about, ever. You never'd be afraid, not if you was killed, you wouldn't. You'd know there was Somebody in the room." This was the most deeply considered speech of her whole life. The last words, ingenuous as a child's unconscious betrayal, tore at him as, he suddenly thought, it would be if he saw a child tortured and in fear: as if he saw Nan. They told him how desperately lonesome and undefended she had felt. "An' don't you see," she concluded, with the brightness of happy discovery, "even if you was killed, what harm would it do you? He'd be waitin'. You'd go with Him. Wherever it is He lives, you'd go."