“I see little signs of its foundations here.”  Susannah spoke with fire.  “Treachery and tyranny are poor bricks.”

“Child, its foundations are in the whole earth, here and everywhere, in every nation and kindred.  Men like Angel Halsey sow wheat; other people have sown tares.  The tares happen to be in blossom just now here in Nauvoo.”  She seemed to forget her seriousness as suddenly, for again she spun round upon the centre of her rose, singing her little musical refrain.

Susannah made one more appeal of the sort that she had made so often before Elvira’s marriage.

“You will not come away with me, Elvira?  I do not like to leave you here; you have not been yourself since Angel died.  You are not bound to this man because you were not sane enough to make a valid choice.”

It was plain speaking, but it did not ruffle Elvira’s composure in the slightest.  She laughed and began to caress her spaniel.  “Mad.  Oh yes, we are all mad, and growing madder, but it is because they have huddled us together at the point of the sword, until now to be a Mormon means to be shut out from the world and shut in to—­to what?  To the prophet’s dreams; and some of them are good, and some of them are bad, and some of them are mad; and let us thank Heaven that they are as good as they are, for to go back to the Gentiles who shot down Angel and the children he was teaching to pray, and your child in your arms, that would be the baddest and maddest act of life.”  She rose up suddenly again.  “Go!” she cried.  There was a flame of real anger in her eyes.  “Since the wish is in your heart, go!  We believe now in strange doctrines.  Two new doctrines we have learned at Nauvoo.  Do you know what they are?  One is ‘baptism of the dead.’  If you get off safely, Susannah, and die in your sins, one of us must be baptized again for you, so that you will be saved in spite of yourself.  But the other doctrine is ’salvation by the shedding of blood.’  Do you understand that doctrine?”

“Indeed I do not.”

“And you speak with a tone that says that you neither know nor care what new things we have been learning.  But you may have reason to care before many hours are over.”

She came near and whispered, “They teach us now that if a man sin wilfully and will not repent, it is better that a minister of the church should slay him, for then his blood will make atonement for his soul.”  She ceased to speak until she had thrust Susannah out of her door, and her last words were in a whisper of awesome import.  “Perhaps a woman’s soul can be saved in the same way.”

Susannah was out again in the cheerful busy street.  She made haste to fulfil the one remaining call before she met her chaise at the hotel.  She felt that her last word was due to the member of the Danite band who had saved her in her hour of need and who had avenged her husband’s blood.