"I have always done it, haven't I? And Hector was with me till a few minutes ago, when he took it into his foolish old head to run after a rabbit. Is your mother any better this afternoon?" "Sit down," he commanded abruptly. "I want to talk to you." She hung the bunch of holly on the twigged limb of a small oak and sat down on a moss-covered rock. Tom sprawled at her feet in the dry leaves, and for a little while he was silent. "You haven't told me yet how your mother is," she reminded him. "She is just the same; lying there so still that you have to look close to see whether she is breathing. The doctor says that if there isn't a change pretty soon, she'll die." "O Tom!" He looked up at her with the old boyish frown pulling his eyebrows together. "She's been good to God all her life; what do you reckon He's letting her die this way for?" It was a terrible question, made more terrible by the savage hardihood that lay behind it. Ardea could not reason with him; and she felt intuitively that at this crisis only reason would appeal to him. Yet she could not turn him away empty-handed in his hour of need. "How can we tell?" she said, and there were tears in her voice. "We only know that He does everything for the best." "Yes; that is what they tell us. But how are we going to _know_?" he demanded. The girl's faith was as simple and confiding as it was defenseless under any fire of argument. "I suppose we can't know, in your sense of the word. But we can believe." "_I_ can't," said Tom fiercely. "I can pretend to; I reckon I've been pretending to all my life; but now I've got to a place where I can't feel anything that I can't touch, nor hear anything that doesn't make a noise, nor see anything that everybody else can't see. From what you've said at different times, you seem to be able to do all these things. Do you really believe?" "I hope I do," she answered, and her voice was low and very earnest. But she would be altogether honest. "Perhaps you wouldn't call it 'belief unto righteousness,' as your Uncle Silas would say. I've never thought much about such things--in the way he says we ought to think about them. They seem to me to be true, like the--well, like the stars and the universe. You don't think about the universe all the time; but you know it is there, and that you are a little, tiny fraction of it, yourself." But these were abstractions, and Tom's need was terribly concrete. "I suppose you mean you haven't been converted, and all that; never mind about that. What I want to know is, did you ever ask God for anything and get it?" "Why, yes; I ask Him for things every day, and get them. Don't you?" "No, not now. But are you sure the things you ask for are not things that you'd get anyway?" he persisted.