“Blessed be the Lord who hath not given us as a prey to their teeth.  Our soul is escaped as a bird out of the snare of the fowler:  the snare is broken, and we are escaped.  Our help is in the name of the Lord, who made heaven and earth.”

While she was exalted by the song she saw the face of her friend the Danite for the first time since the night on which they had ridden so far together.  He was standing now upon the outskirts of the crowd as one who had newly come from a solitary journey.  When he met Susannah’s eye his solitary look passed into one of lofty and intense comradeship.  He ran to her and embraced her, and emptied an inner pocket of a purse of money which he thrust eagerly into her possession.

“I have killed one of them,” he said, speaking eagerly, as a child tells of some exploit.  “His pockets were fat with money, and it is yours.”

“See!” He took the fragment of linen upon which the stain of Halsey’s blood had turned dark with time, and showed her a new and brighter stain upon its edges.

All around them were men and women, who now, for the first time since the hour of some terrible parting, spied kindred or comrades.  By a common impulse these moved toward one another, and there was an interlude in the service for sobs of joy and frantic embracings, and many men and women clasped one another who could claim no kindred, and none forbade, for tears of mutual love were in all eyes.

After that, in the streets or in chance meetings in the houses, the remembrance of this festival of rapturous comradeship gave a new standard to the manners of private life.  The Saints had, as it were, passed from death unto life; former things had passed away; the praises of God were ever upon their lips; they entered with joy into a kingdom of love which they doubted not God had ordained for his elect; many a command of Scripture became illumined with a new practical meaning.  “Greet all the brethren with a holy kiss.”  “Greet ye one another with a kiss of charity.”

Susannah was not much abroad, but she saw the new customs inaugurated.  Believing that they must be transient, knowing, too, that the fierce undercurrent that they expressed must have outlet, and was not of that range of emotions which had to do with the common relationships of life, she felt no shock of offended sentiment.  But in a short space of time, as Elvira grew better, Susannah perceived that the experimental nature of the new life was a dissipation to weaker minds.  This grieved her because of the sacred memory of her husband’s efforts for these people, and because, attuned by party spirit, she entertained a nervous personal desire that they should acquit themselves well.  Just here she found occupation; she gathered the young girls about her in a temporary school, and set herself to soothe and calm the excitement of the women.  The work was intended to last but a few weeks, until Ephraim’s answer came.