Like one who is enraged with his own kin but cannot hear them falsely accused, Susannah contradicted this statement.

“It is perfectly true,” the Governor’s wife declared.  “I have heard it several times.  How long have you been at Nauvoo?”

“Three weeks.”

“And in that time they offered to kill you!  Well, I assure you if you had been a sickly child they wouldn’t have let you live three days.  And they say that that monster they call the prophet has at least a dozen wives.”

“Oh, no.”

“Ten or eleven, at any rate.”

“He has only one, and he has always been very kind to her.”

“How they have imposed upon you!  Where have you been living that you have not heard more of their iniquitous doings than that?”

Susannah was faint and ill with the conflict within her own breast when the dapper Kentucky Governor, on business intent, came to them from a group of the smoking men.

“James,” cried his wife, with an edge of sharpness in her low voice, “this lady doesn’t even know a tithe of the enormities that are practised in Nauvoo.”

He shook his head, and said that it was a compliment to Susannah’s heart and mind that the tenth part had been sufficient to alarm.

His manner was stiff and formal, but his disposition seemed very kind.

He asked Susannah if the Mormons had retained all her property, and what destination she now proposed for herself; and then with great delicacy informed her that there was a proposition among the passengers to make a collection, to defray the expenses of her whole journey.

Susannah’s cheek paled again.

“How could I return it if it came from so many?” she asked.  Her white hands were clasping and unclasping themselves.  Must it indeed be by means of such humiliation that she saved herself from Angel’s Church?

The Governor determined upon further generosity.  “If you would prefer, take it from me as a loan,” he said.

She gave him Ephraim’s address.  It was so long since she had spoken her cousin’s name to any one that tears came when she felt herself bound to explain that she was not certain that he was alive.

“He is probably alive.  Ill news travels fast.”

She blessed the dapper gentleman for this unfounded opinion, for the kindness that prompted it, more than for all else that he had done.

His advice was that Susannah should continue upon that boat with them as far south as Cairo, in order to take advantage of the steam-boats now plying on the Ohio River, so that the expense and weariness of the land journey would be diminished to the small space between the uppermost point on the Ohio and the western entrance of the Erie Canal.  There were several men upon the boat, he said, who could commend her to the care of every captain on the Ohio.

Susannah felt too weak and weary to say more in defence of the morals of Nauvoo.  She could not struggle against the fact that her claim to the generosity of which she stood in such helpless need was recognised and satisfied by the hatred of these Gentiles.