One thing which she had lost in the broken camp by her husband’s grave, one that if she had had greater power of recollection she would not have left behind in that complete breaking with the past, was a packet of the few letters which Ephraim had from time to time written to her.  She did not know whether she had thrown them into the grave with her treasure, or whether they were left a prey to fire and theft, but in her heart she had carried them beyond the loss of their material existence.

The first had answered her insistent question concerning the vexed condition of the devotees of prayer.  It contained no word of criticism of the Mormon creed, nothing that if read aloud could have disturbed Halsey’s peace.  “Perchance,” he had said, “as a medical man applies a poultice or blister to a diseased body to draw out the evil, so to those who pray and are too ignorant, i.e. opinionated, to follow perfectly the greatest teacher of prayer, God may apply circumstances to bring all the evil of heart to the surface, that in this life and the future it may the more quickly work itself away.”  Susannah had so conned this passage that she could now close her eyes and read it as written upon the red dusk of their lids.

The next letter had been written a year later.  He described a great change in his life.  He had gone to spend the winter in Hartford, on the Connecticut River, to be under a new physician, and had there met with a preacher called Mr. Horace Bushnell.  This acquaintance was evidently much to Ephraim.  Susannah had made some complaint of the harshness of the divine counsel in which he asked her to believe; his answer was to send her Bushnell’s sermons on the suffering of God.  Ephraim had added:  “When you went from us, Susy, would you ever have been satisfied if we had detained you by force?  Yet that is what you ask of God.  If you were right in going, let the circumstance prove it; if we were right, let it appear by time.  So says God; and his friendship has eternity to work in; so also has every human friendship.  Let us wait, but in faith.”  This ending, somewhat enigmatical to her, had yet recurred to her heart so often that she knew the words by heart.

The next letter had been written more recently, after a long interval.  At the end of this letter Ephraim had said, “I am persuaded that what we need to help our faith is never more knowledge, but always more love.  I cannot interpret this but by telling you of a fact which I feel to be the key to a great—­the greatest—­truth.  I know a man who believed in God.  He met a woman whom he loved, not as many love, but (I know not why) with all the loves of his heart, as father, as mother, as brother, friend, might love; as lover he loved her with all these loves.  After that he knew God with a knowledge that passed belief.  He could argue no more, but he knew.  This I think is the sort of knowledge which guides unerringly.”  Susannah remembered, if not the words, all that this passage contained.  She had wondered at it not a little.