Susannah rose up when the old man’s story was ended, and stood for some minutes looking wistfully out through the window panes upon the leafless and storm-swept fields.  They two were together in the long, scantily furnished living-room at the end of the long table.  Her figure was stronger, more true in its proportions, than when she had been a girl.  Her hair, trained into smooth obedience, was fastened within the muslin cap she had fashioned for herself, tied Quaker fashion under her chin.  Her face was very white, as if, having blanched with terror in the tragedy of Haun’s Mill, the life-blood had not as yet returned to it.

At last she said simply, “I thank you, sir.”

The old man looked most approvingly at her form and at the subtle witchery which the eagerness of imprisoned thought gave to reticent features, at the depth of her blue eye.  “I wish, my dear, that you could see your way to give up your religion and remain with us.”

“I thank you, sir,” she said again, and went back to the household tasks she had fallen into the habit of performing.

She was not eating the bread of dependence.  In such a place, where woman’s work is at a premium, it was easy for her to do what was reckoned of more value than what she received.  The old man had two sons.  The elder and his wife were in the prime of life, having a large family; the younger son was unmarried.  The farm was large and prosperous.  The one woman, even had she been less amiable, would have naturally desired to keep Susannah as a helper; being the kindly soul she was, she reserved the more attractive tasks for her, and bade the children call her endearing names.  In her blindness, in her slow recovery from utter exhaustion of mind and nerve, Susannah never thought of connecting this long-continued kindness with the fact that the old man’s younger son had as yet no wife.

At first Susannah had fixed her thoughts upon an immediate return to the east, but weeks went by and she had not written to Ephraim Croom for the money that she needed.  The whole civilised world contained for her but one friend to whom she would write.

The Canadian farm, the remote country village of Manchester, and the Mormon sect—­these formed her whole experience.  Her father, who had scolded and played with her; Ephraim, who had understood her and had been the authority to her heart that his parents could not be; her husband, who had wrapped about her such close protection that she had tottered when she thought to walk alone—­these were her real world, and of them only Ephraim was left.

It was not in her nature at any time, above all not in these stricken months, to desire to go out into the world alone to make for herself a sphere of usefulness and a circle of companions.  Hence she thought only of returning to Ephraim, and by his help obtaining some occupation by which she could live simply and within his reach.  But when she thought more closely of throwing herself, as it were, penniless and desolate at the feet of this one prized friendship, doubts arose about her path.