To this, for a moment, he does not reply. Then suddenly, forcing his tongue to do his wish, he repeats: "For your sake I did that also!" "For my sake?" gasps Erma, astounded, then cries out: "Absurd! Impossible!" and having exhausted tears two days before, mocks him with unbelieving laugh. "As God is above me!" "Prove it!" "I will!" And so, being driven to his defence, and knowing that he is pleading for his own happiness--for this child of his _other_ life is to Ralph Travenion, once club man of New York City, but now Mormon bishop of Salt Lake, the thing he loves best in this world--he begins to tell his story, earnestly, as a man struggling to win the lost respect and esteem of the one woman whose respect and esteem he must have,--pathetically, as a father striving to keep his daughter's love. His voice trembles slightly as he begins: "In New York, Wall Street practically ruined me. The ample fortune that I had determined to devote to your happiness and your life, Erma, my daughter, had passed from me. I had, after leaving sufficient for your education, but a few thousand dollars to take with me to this Western world. I had promised my old friend to settle a million dollars on you, so that if he kept his contract to make over a like amount to his son, you could wed Oliver Livingston and take the place in New York society to which you had been born. To keep this promise, I left the old life that was pleasant to me, and came, God help me, to _this_!" He looks about the bare room, with its rough furniture, its uncarpeted floor, its pioneer discomfort, and out through the open window over the long waste that covers the West Tintic Valley. And she looks also, and sees naught but sage brush, unrelieved save by a few floating clouds of dust that, thick and heavy, mark the course of ore-teams from the Scotia mine, making their hot and alkaline way towards the furnaces in Homansville. Then Ralph iterates, "I came to this life for your sake," a far-away look getting into his eyes, for recollections of his old club life and the friends and companions and chums of other days, and pretty yachting excursions on the Sound, and gay opera and dinner parties and _fetes_ at fashionable Newport, come to this exile. Noting this, some idea of what is in his mind comes also to his daughter, and makes her tender to him, and this change in her face gives him courage. He goes on, "For your sake I did this!" "For my sake it was not necessary to be a Mormon."