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.

Tillie saw and felt this sudden change in him. She lifted her free hand
and laid it on his arm, her lips quivering. "Father!" she half
whispered.

She had never called him that before, and it seemed strangely to bring
home to him what, in this crisis of his child's life, was due to her
from him, her only living parent.

Suddenly he released her shoulder and tossed away the str