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“You wish to speak to me?” he asked.

“Yaes,” she said, nodding her head, and then very swiftly, as though she had learned the words by rote—“I am convert unto you, Excellency.”

“Convert!” His eyes kindled and he stared at her without speaking a moment. Her head drooped, as if from its own small weight.

“Yaes,” she said in the lowest, the faintest of voices, “I am convert—Chlistian!”

He seized both her hands, and held them warmly in his own.

“Come into my house, my child,” he said. “Let us talk it over.”

Her hands fluttered in his, then she suddenly withdrew them. They slipped back into her sleeves. She stood uncertainly before him, hesitating to pass through the gate he had opened for her.

“Come!” he urged gently.

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Even while the minister in the coolness of his study softly and gently questioned his faltering “convert,” a wily and smooth-speaking Nakoda was visiting her step-mother. Madame Yamada, as the latter was called, knew the marriage broker well, and being the mother of two daughters by a marriage previous to that with Azalea’s father, she welcomed him with more than usual cordiality.