“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, about which there was nothing extraordinary, nothing not pleasing to God and in conformity to His revealed word. Bishop Wright indeed was puzzled to account for the heat of his manner, and in recounting the interview later to Elder Wardle, he threw out an intimation about strong drink. “To tell you the truth,” he said, “I suspicion he’d jest been putting a new faucet in the cider barrel.” When Prudence came in from the blossoming peach-trees that night her father called her to him to sit on his lap in the dusk while the crickets sang, and grow sleepy as had been her baby habit. “What did Bishop Wright want?” she asked, after her head was pillowed on his arm. Relieved that it was over, now even a little amused, he told her: “He wanted to take my little girl away, to marry her.” She was silent for a moment, and then: “Wouldn’t that be fine, and we could build each other up in the Kingdom.”