“You go up-stairs and take them clo’es off!” he commanded.  “I ain’t leavin’ you wear ’em one hour in this house!”

“I have no others to put on, pop,” Tillie gently answered, her soft eyes meeting his with an absence of fear which puzzled and baffled him.

“Where’s your others, then?”

“I’ve let ’em at Aunty Em’s.  She took ’em in exchange for my plain dress.  She says she can use ’em on ’Manda and Rebecca.”

“Then you walk yourself right back over to the hotel and get ’em back of? of her, and let them clo’es you got on.  Go!” he roughly pointed to the door.

“She wouldn’t give ’em back to me.  She’d know I hadn’t ought to yield up to temptation, and she’d help me to resist by refusing me my fashionable clo’es.”

“You tell her if you come back home without ’em, I’m whippin’ you!  She’ll give ’em to you then.”

“She’d say my love to Christ ought not to be so weak but I can bear anything you want to do to me, pop.  She had to take an awful lot off of gran’pop when she turned plain.  Pop,” she added earnestly, “no matter what you do to me, I ain’t givin’ ’way; I’m standin’ firm to serve Christ!”

“We’ll see oncet!” her father grimly answered, striding across the room and taking his strap from its corner in the kitchen cupboard he grasped Tillie’s slender shoulder and lifted his heavy arm.

And now for the first time in her life his wife interposed a word against his brutality.

“Jake!”

In astonishment he turned to her.  She was as pale as her stepdaughter.

“Jake!  If she has got religion, you’ll have awful bad luck if you try to get her away from it!”

“I ain’t sayin’ she can’t get religion if she wants!  To be sure, I brung her up to be a Christian.  But I don’t hold to this here nonsense of turnin’ plain, and I tole her so, and she’s got to obey to me or I’ll learn her!”

“You’ll have bad luck if you whip her fur somepin like this here,” his wife repeated.  “Don’t you mind how when Aunty Em turned plain and gran’pop he acted to her so ugly that way, it didn’t rain fur two weeks and his crops was spoilt, and he got that boil yet on his neck!  Yes, you’ll see oncet,” she warned him “if you use the strap fur somepin like what this is, what you’ll mebbe come by yet!”

“Och, you’re foolish!” he answered, but his tone was not confident.  His raised arm dropped to his side and he looked uneasily into Tillie’s face, while he still kept his painful grasp of her shoulder.

The soft bright eyes of the young girl met his, not with defiance, but with a light in them that somehow brought before his mind the look her mother had worn the night she died.  Superstition was in his blood, and he shuddered inwardly at his uncanny sense of mystery before this unfamiliar, illumined countenance of his daughter.  The exalted soul of the girl cast a spell which even his unsensitive spirit could keenly feel, and something stirred in his breast—­the latent sense of affectionate, protecting fatherhood.