It was about four o’clock in the afternoon.  The steady sound of the mattock in a neighbouring field was the only token of the common bustling world that lay close around the curious isolation of the hour.

It was time that Angel Halsey should be baptized.  In his Quaker clothes he waded into the water.  His manner now was entirely serene, his face full of joy.

A thought was struck wedge-like into Susannah’s understanding.  If Halsey, who was so manifestly on a higher plane of education and refinement than these others, could so triumphantly embrace the new faith, it must surely contain more of virtue and reason than she could see.  The influence of what he was, being so much greater than the influence of what he had said, caused her mind to work with solemn earnestness as she followed him in sympathy through the symbol of death and resurrection.

When the prophet came back to the shore he appeared for the first time to recognise Susannah, and stopped before her, but at first with a distraught manner, as if he were trying to recollect some dream that eluded him.  He still had his hand familiarly on Halsey’s arm, for he had been conducting him out of the water.

“This is the elect sister?” Smith asked in a hesitating tone, as if still striving with memory.  “Does she desire baptism?”

“Not yet,” answered Halsey, “but I have asked the Lord for her soul, and I believe that it has been given.”

In Halsey’s mind up to this moment there was, no doubt, only the solicitude of the missionary spirit; but Smith was a man whose mind was cast in a different mould; he had already marked the solicitude and given it his own interpretation, and he had already opened his own eyes upon her beauty.  How far this had conscious connection with the condition of actual trance into which he now fell cannot be known.  It is probable that what the Psalmist calls the “secret parts” are not in such minds as Smith’s open to the man’s own eye.

Smith became wrapped in a sudden ecstasy.  Oblivious of all around him, he looked up into the heavens, and it was apparent that his eyes were not beholding the material objects around.  Those about him gazed awe-struck, waiting and listening, for he began to speak in a low unknown tongue, as if holding converse with some one above.

Susannah shrank back, but was held by Emma’s encouraging arm.  Halsey stayed perforce, for the prophet’s grasp had tightened convulsively upon him.

In a few moments the vision was over, and Joseph Smith opened his eyes and smiled in his own slow kindly way upon the frightened girl and upon Angel Halsey, who stood with steadfast mien.

“It has been revealed to me in heaven that the soul of the elect sister is indeed given to be united to the soul of this young disciple, that thereby she may obtain salvation.”

He took Susannah’s hand, and she felt no power to resist him; he clasped Halsey’s almost more timid and reluctant hand over it.