John sneered. He loved Tilly with his whole being, but he despised her belief. "I can tell you why I don't believe," he said, a billow of feeling behind his words. "I believe if there were a God, that God would have to be a God of love, power, and pity, and with my own eyes I've seen-- I have told you about that little orphan girl at home, Dora Boyles. She is a little, helpless, overworked rat without father or mother, in the care of an aunt who is no earthly good--and is crazy about men--crazy about clothes, cards, liquor, and dancing. That little dirty scrap of a girl is a child of God, the same as those polite, well-fed, well-dressed girls and boys we met last night, eh? Well, tell me what is God doing for her? As for me, myself, as I look back on what I went through among those haughty, hidebound people at Ridgeville, before Sam Cavanaugh held out a helping hand-- Well, never mind about that, but I know I've been my own God, and I never run across any other except in the dreams of persons who get the best things of life and don't care whether anybody else gets them or not." "You will think otherwise some day--you will _have_ to," was Tilly's regretful ultimatum. "Someday you will need God so badly that you will turn to Him. I did once, and was answered, too." "You don't mean it," John disputed, warmly. "No prayer was ever answered by any God, on the earth or off of it." "Mine was," Tilly asseverated. "It was one night, and I was at home all alone. Father had lost his temper at an election and--and wounded a man in a dispute. Father was put in jail and mother hurried to him. The man was bleeding to death--the doctors couldn't stop the flow of blood. You can't imagine how I felt. I fell on my knees and prayed with all my soul to God to save my father and the man he had shot. At two o'clock--oh, I don't know how to express it!--at two o'clock I seemed to be lifted up into something like light, but it wasn't that. It was something finer and holier, but I knew, I knew that all was well. My mother came at sunup. She said they had stopped the flowing blood at two o'clock--exactly at two o'clock. My father was released the next day and the man finally recovered." "Things like that happen once in a thousand times," John said, with an indulgent smile, "and people say it is in answer to prayer." "But I know, for I _felt_ it," Tilly responded, simply, and she said no more, for the three older persons had turned and were waiting for them on the street corner. CHAPTER XVII One morning a week later Cavanaugh mounted the scaffold on which John was working. He held some letters in his hand. "That car of brick has been delayed," he announced. "It will be three days before it can be delivered. The men won't like it, but we'll have to shut down for that long, anyway." John frowned and swore, as he stood scraping his trowel on the edge of a brick which he had just tapped into line.