Then, after an interval of unthinking pain, Ephraim perceived that if he had come under a mistaken belief, he had at least come at the right moment; if the bond of her marriage held, the bond of her delusion was broken; she had detected some fraud.  His hope, dazed by one blow, now began to look through the circumstance more clearly.  If he could lead her to renounce the religion in which she had apparently ceased to believe, and persuade her to return to his father’s roof, the Mormon husband himself might seek the dissolution of the marriage.  Therefore Ephraim made no comment on what had passed, but asked gently, “What of last night, Susy?”

With a great effort she stood up, brushing away her tears, brushing back with both hands the hair that had fallen about her face.  In the shock which Ephraim’s proposal had given, in the brief interval of her tears, she had realised as never before that she could not shake off her duty to Angel as she had thought to shake off his creed.  She spoke tremblingly.

“Ephraim, you are so good that you are above us all.  You live in some higher place.  You would have made this great sacrifice to help me.” (She never doubted that Ephraim’s proposal had been born in self-abnegation.) “Surely you can tell me what to do, for I am in great distress; but I want you first to remember that my husband is good, and that he loves me more than all the world, more than everything except God, and if he has told me a lie now, it must have been because he thought to save my soul by it, but I think—­I think that the lie could not have been his.  I think it must have been Joseph Smith’s.”  She spoke very wistfully.

“What was it?” he asked again, tender of the shock she had received, yet still confident that it would be his part to widen this breach.

Looking down with burning cheeks, she told him what Halsey’s story about Newell Knight’s levitation had been.  She remembered it quite clearly and told it baldly.

Before she finished it she heard him mutter below his breath that it was very strange.  She was surprised at his tone of perplexity.

“It is very strange to me,” she cried, “because I know my husband, and up till now he has been so upright and, except that he believed in Joseph Smith, so sensible and wise.”

“And is this all?” asked Ephraim.  “If it were not for this, would you be content to go on as before?”

He had begun to walk slowly on with the horse, and she too walked.  After she had answered him the long silence became oppressive, and she knew that Ephraim was suffering to a degree that she could not understand.  At length when he did speak his words were most unexpected.

He was looking toward the rising sun, which was still dim and flushed with the autumn haze.  “The Christ whom we all worship,” he began abruptly, “each in our different way, called himself by the sacred name of Truth.  Does he desire, do you think, that we must worship him by adhering to what we know to be fact, no matter what would seem to be gained by slighting facts?  It is a great temptation to me to conceal from you, Susannah, a part of my book knowledge which I cannot help thinking has some bearing upon this case—­how much or how little I do not know.”