d?"

"Yes."

"Of course you mean to give her Mormon bringing-up?"

"No."

His questions had been swift. She was amazed at a feeling that some one
else was replying for her.

"I've come to say a few things to you." He stopped to measure her with
stern, speculative eye.

Jane Withersteen loved this man. From earliest childhood she had been
taught to revere and love bishops of her church. And for ten years
Bishop Dyer had been the closest friend and counselor of her father,
and for the greater part of that period her own friend and Scriptural
teacher. Her interpretation of her creed and her religious activity in
fidelity to it, her acceptance of mysterious and holy Mormon truths,
were all invested in this Bishop. Bishop Dyer as an entity was next
to God. He was God's mouthpiece to the little Mormon community at
Cottonwoods. God revealed himself in secret to this mortal.

And Jane Withersteen suddenly suffered a paralyzing affront to her
consciousness of reverence by some strange, irresistible twist of
thought wherein she saw this Bishop as a man. And the train of thought
hurdled the rising, crying protests of that other self whose poise she
had lost. It was not her Bishop who eyed her in curious measurement. It
was a man who tramped into her presence without removing his hat, who
had no greeting for her, who had no semblance of courtesy. In looks,
as in action, he made her think of a bull stamping cross-grained into a
corral. She had heard of Bishop Dyer forgetting the minister in the fury
of a common man, and now she was to feel it. The glance by which she
measured him in turn momentarily veiled the divine in the ordinary.
He looked a rancher; he was booted, spurred, and covered with dust; he
carried a gun at his hip, and she remembered that he had been known
to use it. But during the long moment while he watched her there was
nothing commonplace in the slow-gathering might of his wrath.

"Brother Tull has talked to me," he began. "It was your father's wish
that you marry Tull, and my order. You refused him?"

"Yes."

"You would not give up your friendship with that tramp Venters?"

"No."

"But you'll do as _I_ order!" he thundered. "Why, Jane Withersteen, you
are in danger of becoming a heretic! You can thank your Gentile friends
for that. You face the damning of your soul to perdition."

In the flux and reflux of the whirling torture of Jane's mind, that new,
daring spirit of hers vanished in the old ha