“But have you thought sufficiently—­now?  The time is short.  Bishop Snow could save you.”

“Yes—­but he would kiss me—­he wanted to just now.”  She put both hands over her mouth, with a mocking little grimace that the Entablature of Truth would not have liked to see.

“He would be certain to exalt you.”

She took the hands away long enough to say, “He would be certain to kiss me.”

“You may be lost.”

“I’d rather!”

And so it had ended between them.  Ever since a memorable visit to Salt Lake City, where she had gone to the theatre, she had cherished some entirely novel ideas concerning matrimony.  In that fairyland of delights she had beheld the lover strangely wooing but one mistress, the husband strangely cherishing but one wife.  There had been no talk of “the Kingdom,” and no home portrayed where there were many wives.  That lover, swearing to cherish but one woman for ever, had thrilled her to new conceptions of her own womanhood, had seemed to meet some need of her own heart that she had not until then been conscious of.  Ever after, she had cherished this ideal of the stage, and refused to consider the other.  Yet she had told her father nothing of this, for with her womanhood had come a new reserve—­truths half-divined and others clearly perceived—­which she could not tell any one.

He, in turn, now kept secret from her the delight he felt at her refusal.  He had tried conscientiously to persuade her into the path of salvation, when his every word was a blade to cut at his heart.  Nor was he happy when she refused so definitely the saving hand extended to her.  To know she was to come short of her glory in the after-time was anguish to him; and mingling with that anguish, inflaming and aggravating it, were his own heretical doubts that would not be gone.

In a sheer desperation of bewilderment he longed for the end, longed to know certainly his own fate and hers—­to have them irrevocably fixed—­so that he might no more be torn among many minds, but could begin to pay his own penalties in plain suffering, uncomplicated by this torturing necessity to choose between two courses of action.

And the time was, happily, to be short.  With the first day of 1870 he began to wait.  With prayer and fasting and vigils he waited.  Now was the day when the earth should be purified by fire, the wicked swept from the land, and the lost tribes of Israel restored to their own.  Now was to come the Son of Man who should dwell in righteousness with men, reigning over them on the purified earth for a thousand years.

He watched the mild winter go, with easy faith; and the early spring come and go, with a dawning uneasiness.  For the time was passing with never the blast of a trumpet from the heavens.  He began to see then that he alone, of all Amalon, had kept his faith pure.  For the others had foolishly sown their fields, as if another crop were to be harvested,—­as if they must continue to eat bread that was earth-grown.  Even Prudence had strangely ceased to believe as he did.  Something from the outside had come, he knew not what nor how, to tarnish the fair gold of her certainty.  She had not said so, but he divined it when he shrewdly observed that she was seeking to comfort him, to support his own faith when day after day the Son of Man came not.