y of
attention. She thought to please him and his Church by dressing well and
appearing to be a person of some figure and consequence, but in private
she grumbled at his personal extravagance. At both these changes
Susannah smiled, but to her heart, ever weighing the chances in favour
of Ephraim's constancy, they seemed an ill omen. It was because she was
absorbed in the personal application of all things to her own secret
case that she paid less attention to the prophet's remarks.

Once, passing through the street, when she saw him standing with Darling
at the door of the tithing office, through which the mail for the Mormon
settlement still went and came, she observed the two men were noticing
and speaking of her; she received a disagreeable impression from their
manner.

She supposed that she had found a complete explanation of this sinister
parley when, the next time Smith came, he brought with him an elderly
and foolish man, a new convert who had brought great wealth to the new
city, whom he proposed as a suitor for Elvira's hand. Susannah was very
angry.

Elvira had continued for many months in the lassitude that malarial
fever leaves behind it. Susannah had need to support her, as well as
herself, by the small fees which her day-scholars could afford. She had
had the satisfaction of seeing Elvira restored in a great degree to
health, but so capricious and fantastic were the bright little lady's
words and actions that it was impossible to say whether or not she had
slipped across the wavering line that separates the sane from the
insane.

Susannah stood now in her small sitting-room fiercely facing Smith and
his new satellite. She still adhered to the plain Quaker-like garb that
her husband had liked, and the muslin kerchief crossed upon her breast
was a quaint pearl-like frame to the beauty of feature which had slowly
but surely, in spite of adverse circumstance, come to its prime. Smith's
stalwart figure and the decrepit form of his friend were both clad in
sleek broadcloth. They wore the high white collar and stock of the
period. In Smith's light hair there was not a gray thread, nor were
there many wrinkles in his smooth forceful face. The old man was gray
and wrinkled; he cringed and leered as Susannah rated them for the
proposition they had made.

But the answer to this proposition did not lie in her hands; before she
could compel Smith to withdraw it, or know if his mind was tending
towards that obed