Susannah walked on, almost stunned at first by the throb of intense anger that came with this surprise.  Then the anger was suddenly superseded, hidden and crushed down by a rush of joy.  Ephraim had not neglected her; Ephraim had given her up for dead; but she had no reason to suppose that he was dead, no reason to doubt his faithfulness.  Susannah trod the common street in love with motion as some happy woodland creature treads the dells in the hour of dawn and spring.

When Elvira looked up to see Susannah enter her gate she saw her friend transfigured in a glow of returning youth and hope.  Elvira looked at her timidly; this Susannah she had never seen before.  Elvira’s husband was not present.  The interior of the house was fantastic almost as its mistress, but sultry with luxury.

“Well now, you think you are going,” said Elvira.  “Who’d have thought it?  And only last week General Bennet said to the prophet that if he’d marry you to him he’d send to New York for diamonds both for you and Emma Smith.  He said he’d get a thousand dollars’ worth of diamonds apiece for each of you; but Mr. Darling said that you ought to be married to Mr. Heber, who has just been elected an apostle, because—­” She stopped suddenly, nodding her head.  “You know why—­blood is blood, and we have seen it run in rivers, but we don’t mention it here in Nauvoo.”

Elvira set the French heel of her slipper in the centre of a rose upon her carpet and spun round upon it till her flounces stood out.

    “We don’t mention it here in Nauvoo.”

She sang as if it were the refrain to a song.

Susannah felt from within her shield of new delight an immense pity.  Here again was a revelation of the coarse and frivolous talk that went on at the church meetings, and Elvira was privy to it through that old fool, her husband.  How could she endure him!

“O Elvira, in the last few days I have realised as I did not before that riches are making fools of these men.  How glad I am that my husband died before he knew that this was to be the reward of his lifework and his prayers!”

Elvira stopped dancing.  The mystical side of her character now, as ever, came forward suddenly in the midst of her other interests.  The sunshine was bright in the gaudy room.  A tiny spaniel, which Elvira’s senile slave had procured for her, lay on a red cushion in its full beam, looking more like a toy than a living thing.  When Elvira stopped dancing her flounces settled themselves with an audible rustle, and her thin delicately-cut face looked at Susannah from out its frame of curled hair and gold ornaments like the face of a spirit imprisoned in some unseemly place.

“Heaven help us, Susannah,” she cried shrilly, “if you call Nauvoo the reward of Angel’s prayers.  Look!” she cried, pointing out of the window, “see how the new temple rises; how its white walls shine in the sun!  We are putting thousands upon thousands of dollars into it.  It will be the grandest building this side of the Alleghany mountains.”  She let her small jewelled hand, with its pointing finger, fall suddenly, “and there shall not be left one stone of it upon another, for the House of God is not made with hands.”