He looked at her with warm sympathy.  “You poor ignorant girl!  Not to know your own religion!  I read in that book there about this marrying business only the other day.  Just hand me that one.”

She handed him the “Book of Doctrine and Covenants,” from which she had occasionally taught him the Lord’s word as revealed to Joseph Smith.  The revelation on celestial marriage had never been among her selections.  He turned to it now.

“Here, right in the very first of it—­” and she heard with a sinking heart,—­“’Therefore prepare thyself to receive and obey the instructions which I am about to give unto you; for all those who have this law revealed unto them must obey the same; for behold!  I reveal unto you a new and everlasting covenant; and if ye abide not that covenant then are ye damned, for no one can reject this covenant and be permitted to enter into my glory.’

“There now!”

“I never read it,” she faltered.

“And don’t you know they preach in the tabernacle that anybody who rejects polygamy will be damned?”

“My father never preached that.”

“Well, he knows it—­ask him.”

It was proving to be a hard day for her.

“Of course,” he continued, “a new member coming into the Church might think at first he could get along without so many wives.  He might say, ’Well, now, I’ll draw a line in this marrying business.  I’ll never take more than two or three wives or maybe four.’  He might even be so taken up with one young lady that he’d say, ’I won’t even marry a second wife—­not for some time yet, that is—­not for two or three years, till she begins to get kind of houseworn,’ But then after he’s taken his second, the others would come easy.  Say he marries, first time, a tall, slim, dark girl,”—­he looked at her musingly while she gazed intently into the stream in front of them.

“—­and then say he meets a little chit of a thing, kind of heavy-set like, with this light yellow hair and pretty light blue eyes, that he saw one Sunday at church—­”

Her dark face was flushing now in pained wonder.

“—­why then it’s so easy to keep on and marry others, with the preachers all preaching it from the pulpit.”

“But you wouldn’t have to.”

“No, you wouldn’t have to marry any one after the second—­after this little blonde—­but you’d have to marry her because it says here that you ‘shall abide the law or ye shall be damned, saith the Lord God.’”

He pulled himself along the ground closer to her, and went on again in what seemed to be an extremity of doubt.

“Now I don’t want to be lost, and yet I don’t want to have a whole lot of wives like Brigham or that old coot we see so often on the road.  So what am I going to do?  I might think I’d get along with three or four, but you never can tell what religion will do to a man when he really gets it.”

He reached for her small brown hand that still held the Book of Mormon open on her lap, and took it in both his own.  He went on, appealingly: