f desolation. Where is she?"
and he turned to go back to the house. But the Bishop still paused,
looking toward the orchard.

"Well, the fact is, Brother Joel, you see the Lord has made me feel to
have Prudence for another star in my crown of glory--your daughter
Prudence," he repeated as the other gazed at him with a sudden change of
manner.

"My daughter Prudence--little Prue--that child--that _baby_?"

"_Baby_?--she's fourteen; she was telling my daughter Mattie so jest the
other day, and the Legislatur has made the marrying age twelve for
girls and fifteen for boys, so she's two years overtime already. Of
course, I ain't fifteen, but I'm safer for her than some young cub."

"But Bishop--you don't consider--"

"Oh, of course, I know there's been private talk about her; nobody knows
who her mother was, and they say whoever she was you was never married
to her, so she couldn't have been born right, but I ain't bigoted like
some I could name, and I stand ready to be her Saviour on Mount Zion."

He waited with something of noble concession in his mien.

The other seemed only now to have fully sensed the proposal, and, with
real terror in his face, he began to urge the Bishop toward the house,
after looking anxiously back to where the child still lingered with the
mist of pink blossoms against the leafless boughs above her.

"Come, Brother Seth--come, I beg of you--we'll talk of it--but it can't
be, indeed it can't!"

"Let's ask _her_," suggested the Bishop, disinclined to move.

"Don't, _don't_ ask her!" He seized the other by the arm.

"Come, I'll explain; don't ask her now, at any rate--I beg of you as a
gentleman--as a gentleman, for you are a gentleman."

The Bishop turned somewhat impatiently, then remarked with a dignified
severity:

"Oh, I can be a gentleman whenever it's _necessary_!"

They went across the fields toward the house, and the Bishop spoke
further.

"There ain't any need to get into your high-heeled boots, Brother Rae,
jest because I was aiming to save her to a crown of glory,--a girl
that's thought to have been born on the wrong side of the blanket!"

They stopped by the first corral, and Joel Rae talked. He talked rapidly
and with power, saying many things to make it plain that he was
determined not to look upon the Wild Ram of the Mountains as an
acceptable son-in-law. His manner was excited and distraught, terrified
and indignant,--a manner hardly justified by the circumstances,