in case he needed one?  And his instinct guided him to her whom he had liked well—­Ruth.  Ruth Jones she had called herself at the trial, and when Shefford used the name she laughed mockingly.  Ruth was not very religious, and sometimes she was bitter and hard.  She wanted life, and here she was a prisoner in a lonely valley.  She welcomed Shefford’s visits.  He imagined that she had slightly changed, and whether it was the added six months with its trouble and pain or a growing revolt he could not tell.  After a time he divined that the inevitable retrogression had set in:  she had not enough faith to uphold the burden she had accepted, nor the courage to cast it off.  She was ready to love him.  That did not frighten Shefford, and if she did love him he was not so sure it would not be an anchor for her.  He saw her danger, and then he became what he had never really been in all the days of his ministry—­the real helper.  Unselfishly, for her sake, he found power to influence her; and selfishly, for the sake of Fay Larkin, he began slowly to win her to a possible need.

The days passed swiftly.  Mormons came and went, though in the open day, as laborers; new cabins went up, and a store, and other improvements.  Some part of every evening Shefford spent with Fay, and these visits were no longer unknown to the village.  Women gossiped, in a friendly way about Shefford, but with jealous tongues about the girl.  Joe Lake told Shefford the run of the village talk.  Anything concerning the Sago Lily the droll Mormon took to heart.  He had been hard hit, and admitted it.  Sometimes he went with Shefford to call upon her, but he talked little and never remained long.  Shefford had anticipated antagonism on the part of Joe; however, he did not find it.

Shefford really lived through the busy day for that hour with Fay in the twilight.  And every evening seemed the same.  He would find her in the dark, alone, silent, brooding, hopeless.  Her mood did not puzzle him, but how to keep from plunging her deeper into despair baffled him.  He exhausted all his powers trying to do for her what he had been able to do for Ruth.  Yet he failed.  Something had blunted her.  The shadow of that baneful trial hovered over her, and he came to sense a strange terror in her.  It was mostly always present.  Was she thinking of Jane Withersteen and Lassiter, left dead or imprisoned in the valley from which she had been brought so mysteriously?  Shefford wearied his brain revolving these questions.  The fate of her friends, and the cross she bore—­of these was tragedy born, but the terror—­that Shefford divined came of waiting for the visit of the Mormon whose face she had never seen.  Shefford prayed that he might never meet this man.  Finally he grew desperate.  When he first arrived at the girl’s home she would speak, she showed gladness, relief, and then straightway she dropped back into the shadow of her gloom.  When he got up to go then there was a wistfulness, an unspoken need, an unconscious reliance, in her reluctant good night.