given. Did all her former
suffering go for nothing as a protest against the wrong?

With more curious feelings, more involved sentiments, she regarded the
history of her more inward life. With what strong protest against the
obvious evils attendant upon unreasoning faith had she resisted through
many years the infectious influences of belief in an interfering
spiritual world. Now she had defied Smith with a faith in the ideal
marriage unsupported by any conscious reason, and when she had looked
to the interference of Providence, not even in meekness, but in
desperate challenge, she had strong impression of being encompassed by
invisible power and protection. In vain she said to herself that the
simple and unlooked-for method of her escape was one of those
coincidences which only appear to support faith, that her deliverance
had been of no unearthly sort, but brought about by means doubtfully
righteous--consent to trick the boy and to say little on hearing the
Mormons falsely accused. When she had told herself this, the impression
that underneath her folly a guiding hand had impelled and saved her, in
spite of her small marring of the work, remained. Even while her bosom
was swelling with shame at hearing her husband's sect derided, and
eating the bread of that derision, and still greater shame at knowing
that condemnation was merited, she would find herself resting in the
assurance that beyond and beneath all this confusion of pain there was
for her and for all men an eternal and beneficent purpose.

CHAPTER VI.

Susannah left the canal boat at Rochester. She had borrowed as small a
sum as might be, and was now penniless, possessing only her travel-worn
garments; she had no choice but to start toward Manchester on foot. Food
was easily to be had; such a woman as Susannah had but to enter any
house and state her need. She got a long lift on her way from a farmer
driving to Canandaigua. Of the farmer she asked, while her pulses almost
stopped, some information about Ephraim.

"He's kep up the place to a wonderful degree like his father," said the
farmer.

From this she gathered that Ephraim was alive and in better health.

She asked no more; her lips refused to form his name again.

"The old lady, she was took off with a stroke; she and the old gentleman
is laying together in the graveyard." The farmer volunteered this
information, and Susannah, who had nerved herself to meet Ephraim's
mother with humility