nd
manner he now assumed, controlled Elvira. She stood for some minutes
meekly contemplating her senile and smirking suitor. Susannah protested
and warned her, but in caprice, as sudden as it was unexpected, Elvira
decided to comply with the prophet's request without further persuasion
or command.

When left alone with Susannah she only shrugged her shoulders and said,
"I saw that I should lose my soul if I didn't; the prophet was so
determined. Why should we bicker and consider, and why should I fly
round and round, like a bird round the green eyes of a cat, or try to
escape half a dozen times like a mouse when it is once caught, when I
know from the beginning that Joe Smith will curse me if I don't do his
will?"

"You are quite mistaken. He was not determined; he told me that he only
wished to lay the matter before you and let you decide for yourself."

Elvira let her white eyelids droop until but a narrow slit of the dark
eye was visible. "La! child," she said.

"And you cannot seriously think that Smith's curse, even if he were
barbarous enough to denounce you, could make the slightest difference to
your soul's salvation. You often talk that way, but you cannot seriously
think it, Elvira."

But here Susannah struck against a vein of darkness in her companion's
mind which it seemed to her had lain there like a black incomprehensible
streak since the awful day of anguish and massacre at Haun's Mill.

"Don't speak of it," cried Elvira with a shudder. "Don't you know that
Joe Smith is our prophet, and that he holds the keys of life and death?
Didn't Angel Halsey die to teach us that? Weren't we baptized into it by
being dipped in blood?"

She sat shuddering in the dusk and repeating at intervals "dipped in
blood," "dipped in blood."

Whether Elvira was mad or not, Susannah had no power to stop this
nefarious marriage. The prophet had departed hastily out of reach of her
indignant appeals, and there was no one whose interference she could
seek. In vain she besought Elvira, using both argument and passionate
entreaty. With precipitate waywardness the strange girl was married by
Elder Darling, in the shed of the tithing house.

No letter came from Ephraim Croom or from his friends.

After Elvira's departure Susannah began to save out of her little
income, trying to put by enough dollars not only for the eastern
journey, but to give her respectable support afterwards until she could
obtain employment. She had l