When she looked into the little cracked mirror that night, she saw a strange new face and figure; and, when she entered the ballroom, she felt that others noted the same strangeness, for many looked at her until she felt her cheeks burn.  Then Brigham arose from a sofa, where he had been sitting with his first wife and his last.  He came gallantly toward her; Brigham, whom she knew to be the most favoured of God on earth and the absolute ruler of all the realm about her—­an affable, unpretentious yet dignified gentleman of seventy, who took her hand warmly in both his own, looked her over with his kindly blue eyes, and welcomed her to Zion in words of a fatherly gentleness.  Later, when he had danced with some of his wives, Brigham came to dance with her, light of foot and full of zest for the measure as any youth.

Others danced with her, but during it all she kept finding herself back before the magic square that framed the land where a man loved but one woman.  She remembered that Brigham sat with four of his wives in one of the boxes, enthusiastically applauding that portrayal of a single love.  As the picture came back to her now, there seemed to have been something incongruous in this spectacle.  She observed the seamed and hardened features of his earliest wife, who kept to the sofa during the evening, beside the better favoured Amelia, whom the good man had last married, and she thought of his score or so of wives between them.

Then she knew that what she had seen the night before had been the truth; that she could love no man who did not love her alone.  She tried to imagine the lover in the play going from balcony to balcony, sighing the same impassioned love-tale to woman after woman; or to imagine him with many wives at home, to whom would be taken the news of his death in the tomb of his last.  So she thought of the play and not of the ball, stepping the dances absently, and, when it was all over, she fell asleep, rejoicing that, before their death, the two dear lovers had been sealed for time and eternity, so that they could awaken together in the Kingdom.

They went home the next day, driving down the valley that rolled in billows of green between the broken ranges of the Wasatch and the Oquirrh.  It was no longer of the Kingdom she thought, nor of Brigham and his wives; only of a clean-limbed youth in doublet and hose, a plumed cap, and a silken cloak, who, in a voice that brought the tears back of her eyes, told of his undying love for one woman—­and of the soft, tender woman in the moonlight, who had trusted him and let herself go to him in life and in death.

The world had not ended.  She thought that, in truth, it could not have ended yet; for had she not a life to live?

CHAPTER XXXI.

The Lion of the Lord Sends an Order

They reached home in very different states of mind.  The girl was eager for the solitude of her favourite nook in the canon, where she could dream in peace of the wonderland she had glimpsed; but the little bent man was stirred by dread and chilled with forebodings.  To him, as well as to the girl, the change in the first city of Zion had been a thing to wonder at.  But what had thrilled her with amazed delight brought pain to him.  Zion was no longer held inviolate.