RoBards could not help witnessing from his library window the development of this curious religious romance. Even when he withdrew to his long writing table and made an honest effort to escape the temptation to eavesdropping, he would be pursued by the twangy sententiousness of Ernest and the silvery answers of Immy. There was an old iron settee under his window and a rosebush thereby and the young fanatics would sit there to debate their souls. It was a godlike privilege and distress to overhear such a courtship. His daughter bewildered him. At times Immy was as wild as a mænad. She danced, lied, decoyed, teased, accepted caresses, deliberately invited wrestling matches for her kisses. She rode wild horses and goaded them wilder. She would come home with a shrieking cavalcade and set her foam-flecked steed at the front fence, rather than wait for the gate to be opened. Seeing Immy in amorous frenzies RoBards would be stricken with fear of her and for her. He would wonder if Jud Lasher had not somehow destroyed her innocence; if his invasion of her integrity had not prepared her for corruption. How much of that tragedy did she remember? Or had she forgotten it altogether? He would shudder with the dread that Jud Lasher, who was lying beneath his feet, might be wreaking a posthumous revenge, completing his crime with macaberesque delight. Then Immy’s mood would change utterly. She would repent her youth as a curse, and meditate a religious career. There was a new fashion for sending missionaries to Africa and she was tempted to proselytize the jungle. Ernest rescued her at least from this. He told her that she must make sure her own soul was saved before she went out to save Zulus. Sometimes RoBards, listening with his pen poised above an unfinished word, would seem to understand her devotion to young Chirnside, her acceptance of his intolerant tyranny and the insults he heaped upon her as a wretch whom his God might have foredoomed from past eternity to future eternity. He would talk of election and the conviction of sin and of salvation. And Immy would drink it down. At last there came an evening when young Chirnside called in manifest exaltation. He led Immy to the settee beneath the library window, and RoBards could not resist the opportunity to overhear the business that was so important. He went into his library and softly closed the door. He tiptoed to a vantage point and listened. Young Chirnside coughed and stammered and beat about the bush for a maddening while before he came to his thesis, which was that the Lord had told him to make Immy his wife. He had come to beg her to listen to him and heaven. He had brought a little ring along for the betrothal and—and—how about it? His combination of sermon and proposal ended in a homeliness that proved his sincerity. After all that exordium, the point was, How about it?