“Now you try to tell me right—­like as if I was your own brother—­tell me as a sister.  Try to put yourself in the place of the girl I’d marry first—­no, don’t; it seems more like your sister if I hold it this way—­and try to think how she’d feel when I brought home my second.  Would that be doing square by her?  Wouldn’t it sort of get her on the bark?  But if I join your Church and don’t do that, I might as well be one of those low-down Freewill Baptists or Episcopals.  Come now, tell me true, letting on that you’re my sister.”

She had not looked at him since he began, nor did she now.

“Oh, I don’t know—­I don’t know—­it’s all so mixed!  I thought you could be saved without that.”

“There’s the word of God against me.”

“I wouldn’t want you to marry that way,—­if I were your sister.”

“That’s right now, try to feel like a sister.  You wouldn’t want me to have as many wives as those old codgers down there below, would you?”

“No—­I’m sure you shouldn’t have but one.  Oh, you couldn’t marry more than one, could you?” She turned her eyes for the first time upon him, and he saw that some inward warmth seemed to be melting them.

“Well, I’d hate to disappoint you if you were my sister, but there’s the word of the Lord—­”

“Oh, but could you anyway, even if you didn’t have a sister, and there was no one but her to think of?”

He appeared to debate with himself cautiously.

“Well, now, I must say your teaching has taken a powerful hold on me this summer—­” he reached under her arm and caught her other hand.  “You’ve been like a sister to me and made me think about these things pretty deep and serious.  I don’t know if I could get what you’ve taught me out of my mind or not.”

“But how could you ever marry another wife?”

“Well, a man don’t like to think he’s going to the bad place when he dies, all on account of not marrying a few more times.  It sort of takes the ambition all out of him.”

“Oh, it couldn’t be right!”

“Well now, I’ll do as you say.  Do I forget all these things you’ve been teaching me, and settle down with one wife,—­or do I come into the Kingdom and lash the cinches of my glory good and plenty by marrying whenever I get time to build a new end on the house, like old man Wright does?”

She was silent.

“Like a sister would tell a brother,” he urged, with a tighter pressure of her two hands.  But this seemed to recall another trouble to her mind.

“I—­I’m not fit to be your sister—­don’t talk of it—­you don’t know—­” Her voice broke, and he had to release her hand.  Whereupon he put his own back up against the pine-tree, reached his arm about her, and had her head upon his shoulder.

“There, there now!”

“But you don’t know.”

“Well, I do know—­so just you straighten out that face.  I do know, I tell you.  Now don’t cry and I’ll fix it all right, I promise you.”