“But I did not accuse you of not believing it, Mr. Smith.”

“Do you think I do?”

She remembered the day that he had first shown her his peep-stone with simple, childlike importance.  How young they had both been!  The sunshine on the hill, the voice of the golden woodpecker, the scent of the fallen beech leaves, came back to her.  A decade of terrible years had passed over them both, and he stood seeking her faith just as simply.

“I have tried very hard to understand you, Mr. Smith, but I do not.  I think you must believe most of what you claim for yourself, if not all.  If you had made your story up for the love of power you wouldn’t always be wanting the people to get a better education; you would, as they say of the Roman Catholic priests, want to keep the people ignorant.”

“Go on,” he said.  She found that he was looking at her with intense sadness, but there was not a shadow of evasion in the eager look that met her steadily.

She went on, looking gravely into his face.  “I do not believe that your story was false, Mr. Smith, but it seems to me that you must suspect now that your visions and the gold plates were hallucination, not reality.”  She paused, eager question in tone and look, but the question was of the head, not of the heart.

He knew that; he knew that it did not matter greatly to this thoughtful and beautiful woman whether he had sunk to the deepest degradation or not.  Suddenly he answered her, but not as one who stood at her judgment bar.

“Where is your heart?  Didn’t you see how that man Angel—­angel of purity if ever one walked in human form—­kissed every day the ground you walked upon?  And you did not love him.  The child—­you thought you cared for the child:  I tell you if I had had a child like that, with eyes like the stars and a little mind so untainted, I had laid myself down on his grave and died there.  There’s Emmar and me, we’d be in more trouble if you lost one of your pretty fingers than you would have been in if they had taken and killed us over there in Missouri.”  He added, “If you were another woman, and had not the power to do more than just have a little shallow caring for one and another, where would be your sin?”

Something that she had dimly suspected of herself flashed into apparent truth.  Ephraim, too, had perhaps intended to tell her this when he had said that love, not knowledge, was needed.  She had not loved Halsey and his child as she might have loved.

Susannah had always recognised a certain bigness in Smith’s character because of the power he had of giving himself to man, woman, and child; now she felt her own inferiority.  Was she to stand babbling to him about hallucinations and gold plates?  The man in him had flashed out at her, and because she was not without the heart whose whereabouts he had demanded, the flash awakened an answering fire.  Her cheeks flushed, not with self-consciousness, but with the slow gathering of heart-stricken tears.