Like a flash Doris leaped into her father's room, and clutched his shoulders.
"Run, run," she shouted lustily. "Run for your life. Some one is stealing the car. Father!"
Under the exertion of her strong arms, the figure rose quickly in the bed, and a long shaft of moonshine rested across his face—and it was a stranger. Doris stared at him in amazement, holding the flannel robe about her throat more tightly, and then she sank back away from him, still staring.
"Who—are—you?"
"I am the bishop, my dear," he answered, too startled to remember he wasn't the only bishop in the world. "Your father brought me home with him to spend the night.—Isn't he here? Why, where is he? He came to bed with me."
"Good night," said Doris, with icy dignity, and she arose and swept haughtily from the room.
At the hall window she heard again the spin of the motor, and the low purr as the engine leaped into action, and the car rolled out of the garage. It was father, of course—and bareheaded, too, in the middle of the night—an idiotic thing for a minister to do, going off for a midnight joy-ride leaving a bishop in his bed— Well, Doris should worry! If a preacher couldn't take care of himself, who could?
She went resolutely back to bed, but not to sleep. Where in the world had father gone? Why had he brought a bishop into their home, and put him to bed, and then sneaked off and left him there? And by every conceivable stretch of the imagination that fellow in father's bed was too young to do any respectable bishoping, she was sure of that. Maybe he had only pretended to be a bishop, and father had discovered the deception, and gone for the sheriff—or—oh, dear!
If he was a bishop, Doris knew that no one on earth but the Methodists would have such a young one. The Presbyterians did not approve of bishops in the first place, but if they did, they would have old ones with gray hair and wrinkles.