aughter in this
house. When has it been said to her that her father, dying in his
worldly follies, left her destitute, the pittance she gets needing to go
for his debts? She's had about as good a home as any girl should want,
and your mother and the ministers have dealt faithfully with her
concerning her soul."

Ephraim made a movement of the head as if for a moment he could have
stood upright, feeling in one respect innocent; then again there was
nothing but the droop of shame visible.

His mother looked at him with eyes that were red with weeping. She had
been wiping them with fierce furtive rubs of her handkerchief; now she
was rubbing the handkerchief, a hard ball, in the palm of one hand.
Perhaps grief at Susannah's loss had been dominant until Ephraim's
accusation had fanned her anger. "She'd better have gone with him openly
from the baptising. I never thought then that it was love-making she was
after." Deep scorn was here expressed. "Religion! 'Twasn't much religion
she had in her mind. And we treated her real kindly, Ephraim, thinking
'twas the hold of delusion they had upon her. 'Twould be very small use
to bring her back even if you or your father could have found out which
way they'd gone. 'Tisn't likely she'd stay long if you fetched her,
seeing she's that sort of a girl, with a hankering for the man. There
isn't a place in this house to lock her into unless it is the cellar."

It was perhaps the thought of the unspeakable degradation it would be to
the worthy house to hold a girl as prisoner in the cellar, perhaps the
dismal knowledge that that which had already befallen them and her was
not much better than this, that caused his mother here to lose her
self-control entirely and weep bitterly. Ephraim shrank under her words
as if they had been the strokes of a whip striking him. When she had
ended he went on heavily up the dark stair.

Both the men were in riding-dress. The elder man, when he had comforted
his wife as best he might, laid aside his boots and whip determinedly,
believing that the use for them, as far as concerned the search for his
niece, was at an end. Upstairs, sitting between the three windows that
looked east and north and south, Ephraim sat as long as exhaustion made
rest necessary. He was still equipped for the road, thinking only which
way it behoved him to travel, and when.

CHAPTER X.

The next day, toward afternoon, Joseph Smith stood by the bedside of
Angel Halsey.