“Ay, laddie, that I am!  Strong as an ox!  The very thought of being free out of this Babylon has exalted me in spirit and body.  Think of it, boy!  Soon we shall be even beyond the limits of the United States—­in a foreign land out there to the west, where these bloodthirsty ones can no longer reach us.  Thank God they’re like all snakes—­they can’t jump beyond their own length!”

He leaned out of the wagon to shake a bloodless, trembling fist toward the temple where the soldiers had made their barracks.

“Now let great and grievous judgments, desolations, by famine, sword, and pestilence come upon you, generation of vipers!”

He cracked the whip, the horses took their load at his cheery call, and as the wagon rolled away they heard him singing:—­

  “Lo, the Gentile chain is broken! 
   Freedom’s banner waves on high!”

They watched him until the wagon swung around into the street that fell away to the ferry.  Then they faced each other, and he stepped to her side as she leaned lightly on the gate.

“Prue, dear,” he said, softly, “it’s going hard with me.  God must indeed have a great work reserved for me to try me with such a sacrifice—­so much pain where I could least endure it.  I prayed all the night to be kept firm, for there are two ways open—­one right and one wrong; but I cannot sell my soul so early.  That’s why I wanted to say the last good-bye out here.  I was afraid to say it in there—­I am so weak for you, Prue—­I ache so for you in all this trouble—­why, if I could feel your hands in my hair, I’d laugh at it all—­I’m so weak for you, dearest.”

She tossed her yellow head ever so slightly, and turned the scoop of her bonnet a little away from his pain-lighted face.

“I am not complimented, though—­you care more for your religion than for me.”

He looked at her hungrily.

“No, you are wrong there—­I don’t separate you at all—­I couldn’t—­you and my religion are one—­but, if I must, I can love you in spirit as I worship my God in spirit—­”

“If it will satisfy you, very well!”

“My reward will come—­I shall do a great work, I shall have a Witness from the sky.  Who am I that I should have thought to win a crown without taking up a cross?”

“I am sorry for you.”

“Oh, Prue, there must be a way to save the souls of such as you, even in their blindness.  Would God make a flower like you, only to let it be lost?  There must be a way.  I shall pray until I force it from the secret heavens.”

“My soul will be very well, sir!” she retorted, with a distinct trace of asperity.  “I am not a heathen, I’d thank you to remember—­and when I’m a wife I shall be my husband’s only wife—­”

He winced in acutest pain.

“You have no right to taunt me so.  Else you can’t know what you have meant to me.  Oh, you were all the world, child—­you, of your own dear self—­you would have been all the wives in the world to me—­there are many, many of you, and all in a heavenly one—­”