attention.  She thought to please him and his Church by dressing well and appearing to be a person of some figure and consequence, but in private she grumbled at his personal extravagance.  At both these changes Susannah smiled, but to her heart, ever weighing the chances in favour of Ephraim’s constancy, they seemed an ill omen.  It was because she was absorbed in the personal application of all things to her own secret case that she paid less attention to the prophet’s remarks.

Once, passing through the street, when she saw him standing with Darling at the door of the tithing office, through which the mail for the Mormon settlement still went and came, she observed the two men were noticing and speaking of her; she received a disagreeable impression from their manner.

She supposed that she had found a complete explanation of this sinister parley when, the next time Smith came, he brought with him an elderly and foolish man, a new convert who had brought great wealth to the new city, whom he proposed as a suitor for Elvira’s hand.  Susannah was very angry.

Elvira had continued for many months in the lassitude that malarial fever leaves behind it.  Susannah had need to support her, as well as herself, by the small fees which her day-scholars could afford.  She had had the satisfaction of seeing Elvira restored in a great degree to health, but so capricious and fantastic were the bright little lady’s words and actions that it was impossible to say whether or not she had slipped across the wavering line that separates the sane from the insane.

Susannah stood now in her small sitting-room fiercely facing Smith and his new satellite.  She still adhered to the plain Quaker-like garb that her husband had liked, and the muslin kerchief crossed upon her breast was a quaint pearl-like frame to the beauty of feature which had slowly but surely, in spite of adverse circumstance, come to its prime.  Smith’s stalwart figure and the decrepit form of his friend were both clad in sleek broadcloth.  They wore the high white collar and stock of the period.  In Smith’s light hair there was not a gray thread, nor were there many wrinkles in his smooth forceful face.  The old man was gray and wrinkled; he cringed and leered as Susannah rated them for the proposition they had made.

But the answer to this proposition did not lie in her hands; before she could compel Smith to withdraw it, or know if his mind was tending towards that obedience, Elvira, curious to see the strangers, entered.

Elvira raised a coquettish finger and told Smith that he was a very naughty man.  This was a new freak in her conduct toward the prophet.  Light and frivolous as she had become, the title of prophetess, coveted among Mormon women, had been conferred upon her because some strange power of divination governed her freaks.

“A very naughty man.”  With her delicate prettiness, decked in what gewgaws she could afford, Elvira stood shaking her forefinger.  “You don’t know why?  Oh, fie! you know very well, naughty, naughty creature.”