along the sides of which the forlorn multitude lay, they travelled for some way upon it, the Danite speaking in low tones now and then to the Mormon watchers.  At length they came to a place where a few waggons of better description were standing and a number of horses were tied; here he lifted Susannah from the horse.  Three of the Mormon leaders came up; they evidently knew her and her story.  The eldest took her hand and spoke in broken tones of the crown which Halsey had won in the unseen city of God.

These were the first words that Susannah had heard in unison with Halsey’s own thoughts, and for his sake they endeared the whole wretched Mormon encampment to her.

A woman, her head and shoulders wrapped in a shawl, sprang down from one of the waggons, and Elvira encountered Susannah.

“You expect me to say that I am sorry for you,” she said hurriedly; “I will not.  It is not a time for grief.  We each of us have just so much power of being sorry and no more, and the well has gone dry.  I am glad you have come.  There are a great many things that one can yet be a little glad for; but you must make haste to lie down, for we shall soon enough be called to the march.”

The beds shaken down on the floor of the waggon were covered with reclining women.  Some of them squeezed themselves together to make the place Elvira had vacated large enough for two.  Susannah stretched herself out, loathing with her senses the crowded bed, but with a tender heart for her fellow-sufferers.  After the long dumb weeks of her stern sorrow, after that day’s revolt of injured sentiment, she felt that it was worth while to have come here if only to have made some one else, as Elvira had said, “a little glad.”

The dawn came sighing fitfully, long sighs that rose in the distant fields to the east meeting them in their pilgrimage and dying away westward; the dawn wept also, scattering her tears upon them in like transient showers.

Elvira found her own horse.  The Danite had used yesterday the animal he had provided for Susannah.

“But what right have I to his horse?” Susannah began her question impetuously, but Elvira silenced her.

“Hush!  Don’t let the other women know that it isn’t yours.  Poor things, they will begin to ask why it isn’t theirs.  Do you think that we are living on bowing terms, curtseying to each other and saying, ’After you, madam, if you please’?”

Elvira was changed.  Terror had at last done its work.  Her pretty features were drawn with anxiety; her eye glittered.

“I have been baptized,” she said to Susannah in hard tones.  “When I saw the water red with blood I went down into it.”

Eastward, facing the gusty sobs of the winter morning, they went.  The road was soft, and hundreds of feet treading in front of them had kneaded water and earth together into a slippery mass.  As far as could be seen in front and behind, the line of the pilgrimage stretched, women and children plodding with burdens on their backs, men pushing hand-carts before them, only here and there a waggon or a group of horses.