In the bustle of the start south there were, of necessity, moments in which the crown’s new star could not talk; but these blessed respites were at an end when at last they came to the open road.

At first, as her speech flowed on, he looked sidelong at her, in a trouble of fear and wonder; then, at length, absently, trying to put his mind elsewhere and to leave her voice as the muted murmur of a distant torrent.  He succeeded fairly well in this, for Lorena combined admirably in herself the parts of speaker and listener, and was not, he thankfully noted, watchful of his attention.

But in spite of all he could do, sentences would come to seize upon his ears:  “...  No chance at all back there for a good girl with any heart in her unless she’s one of the doll-baby kind, and, thank fortune, I never was that!  Now there was Wilbur Watkins—­his father was president of the board of chosen freeholders—­Wilbur had a way of saying, ’Lorena’s all right—­she weighs a hundred and seventy-eight pounds on the big scales down to the city meatmarket, and it’s most of it heart—­a hundred and seventy-eight pounds and most all heart—­and she’d be a prize to anybody,’ but then, that was his way,—­Wilbur was a good deal of a take-on,—­and there was never anything between him and me.  And when the Elder come along and begun to preach about the new Zion and tell about the strange ways that the Lord had ordered people to act out here, something kind of went all through me, and I says, ’That’s the place for me!’ Of course, the saying is, ’There ain’t any Gawd west of the Missouri,’ but them that says it ain’t of the house of Israel—­lots of folks purtends to be great Bible readers, but pin ’em right down and what do you find?—­you find they ain’t really studied it—­not what you could call pored over it.  They fuss through a chapter here and there, and rush lickety-brindle through another, and ain’t got the blessed truth out of any of ’em—­little fine points, like where the Lord hardened Pharaoh’s heart every time, for why?—­because if He hadn’t ‘a’ done it Pharaoh would ‘a’ give in the very first time and spoiled the whole thing.  And then the Lord would visit so plumb natural and commonlike with Moses—­like tellin’ him, ’I appeared unto Abraham, unto Isaac, and unto Jacob by the name of God Almighty, for by my name Jehovah was I not known unto them.’  I thought that was awful cute and friendly, stoppin’ to talk about His name that way.  Oh, I’ve spent hours and hours over the blessed Book.  I bet I know something you don’t, now—­what verse in the Bible has every letter in the alphabet in it except ‘J’?  Of course you wouldn’t know.  Plenty of preachers don’t.  It’s the twenty-first verse of the seventh chapter of the book of Ezra.  And the Book of Mormon—­I do love to git set down in a rocker with my shoes off—­I’m kind of a heavy-footed person to be on my feet all day—­and that blessed Book in my hands—­such beautiful language