“I’m going to have you married proper,” Truslow looked back to his daughter, “by Mister Starbuck, who knows how to talk to God, and if you break your vows, Sally, then God will whip your hide till it bleeds dry. God won’t be mocked, girl. You offend him and you’ll end up like your mother, dead before your time and food to worms.”

“I’ll be a good girl,” Sally whined, and she looked straight at Starbuck for the first time, and Starbuck’s breath checked in his throat as he stared back. Once, when Starbuck had been a small child, his Uncle Matthew had taken him to Faneuil Hall to see a demonstration of the electrical force, and Starbuck had held hands in a ring of onlookers as the lecturer fed a current through their linked bodies. He felt then something of what he experienced now, a tingling thrill that momentarily made the rest of the world seem unimportant. Then, as soon as he recognized the excitement, he felt a kind of desperation. This feeling was sin. It was the devil’s work. Surely he must be soul sick? For surely no ordinary, decent man would be so entranced by every girl who had a pretty face? Then, jealously, he wondered whether Thomas Truslow’s suspicions were right and that Ethan Ridley had been this girl’s sweetheart, and Starbuck felt a stab of corrosive jealousy as sharp as a blade, then a fierce anger that Ridley could deceive Washington and Anna Faulconer. “Are you a proper preacherman?” Sally cuffed her nose and asked Starbuck.

“I wouldn’t ask him to wed you otherwise,” her father insisted.

“I was asking him myself,” she said defiantly, keeping her eyes on Starbuck, and he knew she had seen clean into his soul. She was seeing his lust and his weakness, his sinfulness and his fear. Starbuck’s father had often warned him against the powers of women, and Starbuck had thought he had met those powers at their most devilish in Mademoiselle Dominique Demarest, but Dominique had possessed nothing to compare with this girl’s intensity. “And if a girl can’t ask a preacherman who’s marrying her just what kind of a preacherman he is,” Sally insisted, “then what can she ask?” Her voice was low, like her father’s, but where his generated fear, hers suggested something infinitely more dangerous. “So are you a proper preacherman, mister?” she demanded of Starbuck again.

“Yes.” Starbuck told the lie for the sake of Thomas Truslow, and because he dared not let the truth enslave him to this girl.

“I guess we’re all ready, then,” Sally said defiantly. She did not want to be married, but neither did she want to appear browbeaten. “You got a ring for us, Pa?”