“Tell him to wait till to-morrow.  I shall speak of this in meeting then.  It will be all right—­all right, dear.  Everything will be all right!”

“Only I am sure you are sick in spite of what you say.  I know how to prove it, too—­can you eat?”

“I’m too busy thinking of great things to be hungry.”

“There—­you would be hungry if you were well.”

“I can’t tell you how well I am, and as for food—­our Elder Brother has been feeding me all day with the bread of truth.  Such wonderful new things the Lord has shown me!”

“But you must not get up.  Lie still and we will nurse you.”

He refused the food she brought him, and refused Lorena’s sage tea.  He was not to be cajoled into treating as sickness the first real happiness he had felt for years.  He lay still until his little room grew shadowy in the dusk, filled with a great reviving hope that the Lord had raised a new prophet to lead Israel out of bondage.

As the night fell, however, the shadows of the room began to trouble him as of old, and he found himself growing hotter and hotter until he burned and gasped and the room seemed about to stifle him.  He arose from the bed, wondering that his feet should be so heavy and clumsy, and his knees so weak, when he felt otherwise so strong.  His head, too, felt large, and there rang in his ears a singing of incessant quick beats.  He made his way to the door, where he heard the voices of Prudence and Follett.  It was good to feel the cool night air upon his hot face, and he reassured Prudence, who chided him for leaving his bed.

“When you hear me discourse tomorrow you will see how wrong you were about my being sick,” he said.  But she saw that he supported himself carefully from the doorway along the wall to the near-by chair, and that he sank into it with every sign of weakness.  His eyes, however, were aglow with his secret, and he sat nodding his head over it in a lively way.  “Brigham was right,” he said, “when he declared that any of us might receive revelations from on high; even the least of us—­only we are apt to be deaf to the whispered words until the Lord has scourged us.  I have been deaf a long time, but my ears are at last unstopped—­who is it coming, dear?”

A tall figure, vague in the dusk, was walking briskly up the path that led in from the road.  It proved to be the Wild Ram of the Mountains, freshened by the look of rectitude that the razor gave to his face each Saturday night.

“Evening, Brother Rae—­evening, you young folks.  Thank you, I will take a chair.  You feeling a bit more able than usual, Brother Rae?”

“Much better, Brother Seth.  I shall be at meeting tomorrow.”

“Glad to hear it, that’s right good—­you ain’t been out for so long.  And we want to have a rousing time, too.”

“Only we’re afraid he has a fever instead of being so well,” said Prudence.  “He hasn’t eaten a thing all day.”