She raised her eyes and fixed them on his. "It is not what she says, but what it seems to me she ought to say and don't that seems strange to me," was her reply. "Why, there is no mention at all about any of John's kin--not one single word about his mother--not one single word about any woman stepping in even for a minute. I don't care anything about your tabernacles or your whisky-joints--what seems strange to me is that Tilly don't seem to have made a single acquaintance since she got there. She writes, you see, about Cavanaugh coming over and why his wife didn't, as if that was something to tell. She writes about John being away in the country all day, and, as far as I can gather, she is at home all by herself from dawn till nightfall. There is something powerfully odd about all that. I don't know what it is, but it is there." "I know one thing about John Trott that I didn't know when he was here," Whaley pursued, tapping his thumb with the case of his glasses, "and I tell you if I had known it he would have had to change before he took a daughter of mine to live under a roof with him. I got it straight that he's been heard to say that he didn't believe in a God or the Bible, and that folks were silly fools that did. I heard it this morning and I made it my business to trace it down. He said it, and I'm here to say that I don't want to be the granddaddy of the children of an atheist. The wrath of an offended God would fall on them and on me. Tilly was put in my care. The Catholics damned the soul of my son when he went over to those idol-worshipers through the wiles of a present-day Eve, and here I stood stock-still and let an avowed atheist take away my daughter. Do you think I'm going to stand it? Man-killing is said to be wrong, but killing human snakes is not, and a man that will lead an innocent Christian girl away from the smiles of God deserves death, let the law of the land be what it may. I've got a good pistol. I've got a steady finger and a firm arm. I tell you to look out. I don't know what may happen. Our Lord said Himself that He came not to bring peace, but a sword, and I'll be at war with atheism against my own flesh and blood till I die." "You wouldn't be as foolish as that," Mrs. Whaley faltered, for once daring to oppose her spouse. "Even if he is an infidel he may get over it under--under Tilly's influence." "Get over it, a dog's hind foot!" Whaley sniffed, his great nostrils fluttering, his harsh face rigid. "No wife ever does. They go with their husbands and so do the children, and children's children, all the way down, if the flow of hell's poison is not stopped, and I'll stop it."