question with
her how far they permeated his life. In a minute more he turned again
and spoke modestly and sadly enough.

"As I have said before, it is not in me to greatly love our brother
Halsey's manner of thought, but I perceive his holiness and the Church
shall not lack his counsel. I am here to-day to tell you how much it
grieves me to set a constraint upon his conscience, yet I am here also
to ask you to tell him from me that it is not the will of the Lord that
he should continue to preach against the spirit of self-defence."

When he was gone Susannah realised how angry she would have been if she
had heard that Smith had rebuked her husband on this subject, yet now
that the fiat lay in her own hands to impart with all gentleness, the
task, because of her own fierce attitude toward the oppression, was
grateful to her.

When the roof had been set on the white walls of the first great Mormon
temple upon Kirtland Bluff, a small army, well armed, well provisioned,
went out from Kirtland for the deliverance of Zion amid the prayers and
huzzahs of the little community. There were many who, like Halsey,
bewailed in secret this taking of the sword, but the doctrine of
non-resistance was never preached again.

CHAPTER VIII.

After this Susannah's attention was centred upon the coming of her first
child.

"'Tain't lucky to have a child when the leaves are falling," said Elvira
Halsey, a certain mist of far-off vision clouding her sparkling eyes.

Susannah had been greatly weighed down by depression, not fearing
ill-luck, but regretting for the first time unfeignedly that she had
ever joined herself to the sect in which her child must now be nurtured.
For herself, feeling often that all religions were equally false, it had
mattered little; with strange inconsistency she now perceived that she
would greatly prefer another faith for her child. Susannah literally
found no place for repentance; to confess her grief to Halsey would only
have been to crush out all the domestic joy of his life; she was too
courageous to do that when she saw no corresponding good to be gained.
Yet when the baby at length lay on her lap, grew and smiled, kicked and
crowed, Susannah forgot at times, for hours together, the superstitions
of the Latter-Day Saints. The motherly solicitude which she had long
exercised over Halsey changed into something more like friendship when
she saw him hang over her and her child as they played toget