Then in the night would come the terrors of the dark, the curses and groans of that always-dying thing behind him.  And always now he would see the hand with the silver bracelet at the wrist, flaunting in his face the shivering strands of gold with the crimson patch at the end.  Yet even this, because he could see it, was less fearful than the thing he could not see, the thing that crawled or lurched relentlessly behind him, with the snoring sound in its throat, the smell of warm blood and the horrible dripping of it, whose breath he could feel on his neck and whose nerveless hands sometimes fumbled weakly at his shoulder, as it strove to come in front of him.

He sat sleepless in his chair with candles burning for three nights when Follett, late in August, went off to meet a messenger from one of his father’s wagon-trains which, he said, was on its way north.  Fearful as was the meaning of his presence, he was inexpressibly glad when the Gentile returned to save him from the terrors of the night.

And there was now a new goad of remorse.  The evening before Follett’s return he had found Prudence in tears after a visit to the village.  With a sudden great outrush of pity he had taken her in his arms to comfort her, feeling the selfishness strangely washed from his love, as the sobs convulsed her.

“Come, come, child—­tell your father what it is,” he had urged her, and when she became a little quiet she had told him.

“Oh, Daddy dear—­I’ve just heard such an awful thing, what they talk of me in Amalon, and of you and my mother—­shameful!”

He knew then what was coming; he had wondered indeed, that this talk should be so long in reaching her; but he waited silently, soothing her.

“They say, whoever my mother was, you couldn’t have married her—­that Christina is your first wife, and the temple records show it.  And oh, Daddy, they say it means that I am a child of sin—­and shame—­and it made me want to kill myself.”

Another passion of tears and sobs had overwhelmed her and all but broken down the little man.  Yet he controlled himself and soothed her again to quietness.

“It is all wrong, child, all wrong.  You are not a child of sin, but a child of love, as rightly born as any in Amalon.  Believe me, and pay no heed to that talk.”

“They have been saying it for years, and I never knew.”

“They say what is not true.”

“You were married to my mother, then?”

He waited too long.  She divined, clear though his answer was, that he had evaded, or was quibbling in some way.

“You are the daughter of a truly married husband and wife, as truly married as were ever any pair.”

And though she knew he had turned her question, she saw that he must have done it for some great reason of his own, and, even in her grief, she would not pain him by asking another.  She could feel that he suffered as she did, and he seemed, moreover, to be pitifully and strangely frightened.