nto him from boyhood, flashed up in his heart with more fire than
ever. Even when a late comer from Nauvoo told him that Prudence Corson
had married Captain Girnway of the Carthage Grays, two years after the
exodus from Nauvoo, his first feeling was one of blazing anger against
the mobocrats rather than regret for his lost love.

"They moved down to Jackson County, Missouri, too," concluded his
informant, thus adding to the flame. They had gone to set up their home
in the very Zion that the Gentiles with so much bloodshed had wrested
from the Saints.

Even when the first anger cooled and he could face the thing calmly in
all its deeper aspects, he was still very bitter. While he had stanchly
kept himself for her, cherishing with a single heart all the old
memories of her dearness, she had been a wife these seven years,--the
wife, moreover, of a mob-leader whose minions had put them out of their
home, and then wantonly tossed his father like a dead branch into the
waters. She had loved this uniformed murderer--his little Prue--perhaps
borne him children, while he, Joel Rae, had been all too scrupulously
true to her memory, fighting against even the pleased look at a woman;
fighting--only the One above could know with what desperate
valour--against the warm-hearted girl with the gray eyes and the red
lips, who laughed in her knowledge that she drew him--fighting her away
for a sentimental figment, until she had married another.

Now when he might have let himself turn to her, his heart freed of the
image of that yellow-haired girl so long cherished, this other was the
wife of Elder Pixley--the fifth wife--and an unloving wife as he knew.

She had sought him before the marriage, and there had been some wholly
frank and simple talk between them. It had ended by his advising her to
marry Elder Pixley so that she might be saved into the Kingdom, and by
her replying, with the old reckless laugh, a little dry and strained,
and with the wonderful gray eyes full upon him,--"Oh, I'll marry him!
Small difference to me what man of them I marry at all,--now!"

And while he, by a mighty effort, had held down his arms and let her
turn away, the woman for whose memory he did it was the wife of an
enemy, caring nothing for his fidelity, sure to feel not more than
amused pity for him should she ever know of it. Surely, it had been a
brave struggle--for nothing.

But again the saving thought came that he was being tried for a purpose,