When in the succeeding days she had time to meditate, while she spent many a long hour on the decks of river-boats watching the shimmering lights and shades that pass upon open river surfaces, the perplexing and contrasting aspects of her situation played in like manner upon her heart.

She had suffered so much, such long and deadly ill, as a member of this almost innocent sect, suffered bravely in protest against the vile injustice of the persecution, and now that she was escaping from miseries inflicted by this same sect, she was wrapped in the kindly reverse side of the persecuting spirit, and carried home in it, with all the deference that would be accorded to a lost child.  She was too tired and helpless now to defy the good thus given.  Did all her former suffering go for nothing as a protest against the wrong?

With more curious feelings, more involved sentiments, she regarded the history of her more inward life.  With what strong protest against the obvious evils attendant upon unreasoning faith had she resisted through many years the infectious influences of belief in an interfering spiritual world.  Now she had defied Smith with a faith in the ideal marriage unsupported by any conscious reason, and when she had looked to the interference of Providence, not even in meekness, but in desperate challenge, she had strong impression of being encompassed by invisible power and protection.  In vain she said to herself that the simple and unlooked-for method of her escape was one of those coincidences which only appear to support faith, that her deliverance had been of no unearthly sort, but brought about by means doubtfully righteous—­consent to trick the boy and to say little on hearing the Mormons falsely accused.  When she had told herself this, the impression that underneath her folly a guiding hand had impelled and saved her, in spite of her small marring of the work, remained.  Even while her bosom was swelling with shame at hearing her husband’s sect derided, and eating the bread of that derision, and still greater shame at knowing that condemnation was merited, she would find herself resting in the assurance that beyond and beneath all this confusion of pain there was for her and for all men an eternal and beneficent purpose.

CHAPTER VI.

Susannah left the canal boat at Rochester.  She had borrowed as small a sum as might be, and was now penniless, possessing only her travel-worn garments; she had no choice but to start toward Manchester on foot.  Food was easily to be had; such a woman as Susannah had but to enter any house and state her need.  She got a long lift on her way from a farmer driving to Canandaigua.  Of the farmer she asked, while her pulses almost stopped, some information about Ephraim.

“He’s kep up the place to a wonderful degree like his father,” said the farmer.

From this she gathered that Ephraim was alive and in better health.