But here Susannah struck against a vein of darkness in her companion’s mind which it seemed to her had lain there like a black incomprehensible streak since the awful day of anguish and massacre at Haun’s Mill.

“Don’t speak of it,” cried Elvira with a shudder.  “Don’t you know that Joe Smith is our prophet, and that he holds the keys of life and death?  Didn’t Angel Halsey die to teach us that?  Weren’t we baptized into it by being dipped in blood?”

She sat shuddering in the dusk and repeating at intervals “dipped in blood,” “dipped in blood.”

Whether Elvira was mad or not, Susannah had no power to stop this nefarious marriage.  The prophet had departed hastily out of reach of her indignant appeals, and there was no one whose interference she could seek.  In vain she besought Elvira, using both argument and passionate entreaty.  With precipitate waywardness the strange girl was married by Elder Darling, in the shed of the tithing house.

No letter came from Ephraim Croom or from his friends.

After Elvira’s departure Susannah began to save out of her little income, trying to put by enough dollars not only for the eastern journey, but to give her respectable support afterwards until she could obtain employment.  She had little heart for the object of her saving; she might, she knew, be going to ignominy and starvation, for with the stigma of Mormonism upon her, she felt that it was unlikely that she would be received with credit in any town where she was friendless and unknown.

Although the community prospered greatly, Smith did not again interfere to increase Susannah’s school fees.  Emma began to talk largely of the splendour of Nauvoo, reading from her husband’s letters of the Nauvoo House, a huge hotel, which was being rapidly and grandly built for the perpetual occupation of himself and family and the entertainment of all such as the Church of the Saints should delight to honour.

Susannah found it hard to understand why Emma was not taken to Nauvoo even before the great house was built for her reception.  It was indeed commonly reported among the Gentiles at this time that the prophet had secretly espoused other wives; but a malignant report of this nature, together with accusations of drunkenness and rank dishonesty, had persistently followed the sect from its beginning, and, as far as Susannah knew, were now, as before, totally untrue.  This special report, however, reached Emma in an hour of depression, and she came to Susannah for sympathy, shaken with grief and indignation.

“What does it mean that they always say that of him when the one thing that he’s done has been to excommunicate any of the brethren that taught any such thing?  And there’s just been an awful row on in the Council of Nauvoo against Sydney Rigdon and some pamphlet he’s written on a doctrine he calls ‘Spiritual Wives,’ and Joseph has risen up and cast him out, even though he was his best friend.”