"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.