It was more than ten years since that day in the Meadows, and the blight there put upon his person had waxed with each year.  His hair showed now but the faintest sprinkle of black, his shoulders were bent and rounded as if bearing invisible burdens, and his face had the look of drooping in grief and despair, as one who was made constantly to look upon all the suffering of all the world.  Yet he wore always, except when alone, a not unpleasant little effort of a smile, as if he would conceal his pain.  But this deceived few.  The women of the settlement had come to call him “the little man of sorrows.”  Even his wife, Lorena, had divined that his mind was not one with hers; that, somehow, there was a gulf between them which her best-meant cheerfulness could not span.  In a measure she had ceased to try, doing little more than to sing, when he was near, some hymn which she considered suitable to his condition.  One favourite at such times began:—­

  “Lord, we are vile, conceived in sin,
   And born unholy and unclean;
   Sprung from the man whose guilty fall
   Corrupts his race and taints us all.

  “Soon as we draw our infant breath,
   The seeds of sin grow up for death;
   The law demands a perfect heart,
   But we’re defiled in every part.”

She would sing many verses of this with appealing unction, so long as he was near; yet when he came upon her unawares he might hear her voicing some cheerful, secular ballad, like—­

  “As I went down to Coffey’s mills
     Some pleasure for to see,
   I fell in love with a railroad-er,
     He fell in love with me.”

The stolid Christina listened entranced to all of Lorena’s songs, charmed by the melody not less than she was awed by her sister-wife’s superior gifts of language.  The husband, too, listened not without resignation, reflecting that, when Lorena did not sing, she talked.  For the unspeaking Christina he had learned to feel an admiration that bordered upon reverence, finding in her silence something spiritually great.  Yet of the many-worded Lorena he was never heard to complain through all the years.  The nearest he approached to it was on a day when Elder Beil Wardle had sought to condole with him on the affliction of her ready speech.

“That woman of yours,” said this observant friend, “sure takes large pie-bites out of any little talk that happens to get going.”

“She does have the gift of continuance,” her husband had admitted.  But he had added, hastily, “Though her heart is perfect with the Lord.”

The fact that she was sealed to him for eternity, and that she believed she would constitute one of his claims to exaltation in the celestial world, were often matters of pious speculation with him.  He wondered if he had done right by her.  She deserved a husband who would be saved into the kingdom, while he who had married her was irrevocably lost.