n entering, Sibylla asked him to take some breakfast. Breakfast!
echoed Jan, did she call that breakfast? He thought it was their
lunch--it was getting on for his dinner-time. Jan was giving Lionel a
history of the moonlight flitting, and of Susan Peckaby's expected
expedition to New Jerusalem on a white donkey.

"It ought to have been stopped," said Lionel, when his laughter had
subsided. "They are going out to misery, and to nothing else, poor
deluded creatures!"

"Who was to stop it?" asked Jan.

"Some one might have told them the truth. If this Brother Jarrum
represented things in rose-coloured hues, could nobody open to their
view the other side of the picture? I should have endeavoured to do it,
had I been here. If they chose to risk the venture after that, it would
have been their own fault."

"You'd have done no good," said Jan. "Once let 'em get the Mormon fever
upon 'em, and it must run its course. It's like the gold fever; nothing
will convince folks they are mistaken as to that, except the going out
to Australia to the diggings. That will."

A faint tinge of brighter colour rose to Sibylla's cheeks at this
allusion, and Lionel knit his brow. He would have avoided for ever any
chain of thought that led his memory to Frederick Massingbird: he could
not bear to think that his young bride had been another's before she was
his. Jan, happily ignorant, continued.

"There's Susan Peckaby. She has got it in her head that she's going
straight off to Paradise, once she is in the Salt Lake City. Well, now,
Lionel, if you, and all the world to help you, set yourselves on to
convince her that she's mistaken, you couldn't do it. They must go out
and find the level of things for themselves--there's no help for it."

"Jan, it is not likely that Susan Peckaby really expects a white donkey
to be sent for her!" cried Sibylla.

"She as fully expects the white donkey, as I expect that I shall go from
here presently, and drop in on Poynton, on my way home," earnestly said
Jan. "He has had a kick from a horse on his shin, and a nasty place it
is," added Jan in a parenthesis. "Nothing on earth would convince Susan
Peckaby that the donkey's a myth, or will be a myth; and she wastes all
her time looking out for it. If you were opposite their place now, you'd
see her head somewhere; poked out at the door, or peeping from the
upstairs window."

"I wish I could get them all back again--those who have gone from here!"
warmly sp