Follett looked interested and cordial, but her father failed to display the enthusiasm she had expected, and seemed even a little embarrassed.

“You mean well, daughter, but don’t be discouraged if he is slow to take our truth.  Perhaps he has a kind of his own as good as ours.  A woman I knew once said to me,’ Going to heaven is like going to mill; if your wheat is good the miller will never ask how you came.’”

“But, Father, suppose you get to mill and have only chaff?”

“That is the same answer I made, dear.  I wish I hadn’t.”

Later, when Prudence had gone, the two men made their beds by the fire in the big room.  Follett was awakened twice by the other putting wood on the fire; and twice more by his pitiful pleading with something at his back not to come in front of him.

CHAPTER XXXVI.

The Mission to a Deserving Gentile

Not daunted by her father’s strange lack of enthusiasm, Prudence arose with the thought of her self-imposed mission strong upon her.  Nor was she in any degree cooled from it by a sight of the lost sheep striding up from the creek, the first level sunrays touching his tousled yellow hair, his face glowing, breathing his full of the wine-like air, and joyously showing in every move his faultless attunement with all outside himself.  The frank simplicity of his greeting, his careless unenlightenment of his own wretched spiritual state, thrilled her like an electric shock with a strange new pity for him.  She prayed on the spot for power to send him into the waters of baptism.  When the day had begun, she lost no time in opening up the truth to him.

If the young man was at all amazed by the utter wholeness of her conviction that she was stooping from an immense height to pluck him from the burning, he succeeded in hiding it.  He assumed with her at once that she was saved, that he was in the way of being lost, and that his behooving was to listen to her meekly.  Her very evident alarm for his lost condition, her earnest desire to save him, were what he felt moved to dwell upon, rather than a certain spiritual condescension which he could not wholly ignore.

After some general counsel, in the morning, she took out her old, dog-eared “Book of Mormon,” a first edition, printed at Palmyra, New York, in 1830, “By Joseph Smith, Jr., Author and Proprietor,” and led the not unworthy Gentile again to the canon.  There in her favourite nook of pines beside the stream, she would share with him as much of the Lord’s truth as his darkened mind could be made conscious of.

When at last she was seated on the brown carpet under the pines, her back to a mighty boulder, the sacred record in her lap, and the Gentile prone at her feet, she found it no easy task to begin.  First he must be brought to repent of his sins.  She began to wonder what his sins could be, and from that drifted into an idle survey of his profile, the line of his throat as his head lay back on the ground, and the strong brown hand, veined and corded, that curled in repose on his breast.  She checked herself in this; for it could be profitable neither to her soul nor to his.