“Who is she, Joe?  Where did she come from?” asked Shefford, very low, with his eyes cast down.

“I don’t know.  I can’t find out.  Nobody knows.  It’s a mystery—­to all the younger Mormons, anyway.”

Shefford burned to ask questions about the Mormon whose sealed wife the girl was, but he respected Joe too much to take advantage of him in a poignant moment like this.  Besides, it was only jealousy that made him burn to know the Mormon’s identity, and jealousy had become a creeping, insidious, growing fire.  He would be wise not to add fuel to it.  He rejected many things before he thought of one that he could voice to his friend.

“Joe, it’s only her body that belongs to—­to . . . .  Her soul is lost to—­”

“John Shefford, let that go.  My mind’s tired.  I’ve been taught so and so, and I’m not bright. . . .  But, after all, men are much alike.  The thing with you and me is this—­we don’t want to see her grave!”

Love spoke there.  The Mormon had seized upon the single elemental point that concerned him and his friend in their relation to this unfortunate girl.  His simple, powerful statement united them; it gave the lie to his hint of denseness; it stripped the truth naked.  It was such a wonderful thought-provoking statement that Shefford needed time to ponder how deep the Mormon was.  To what limit would he go?  Did he mean that here, between two men who loved the same girl, class, duty, honor, creed were nothing if they stood in the way of her deliverance and her life?

“Joe Lake, you Mormons are impossible,” said Shefford, deliberately.  “You don’t want to see her grave.  So long as she lives—­remains on the earth—­white and gold like the flower you call her, that’s enough for you.  It’s her body you think of.  And that’s the great and horrible error in your religion. . . .  But death of the soul is infinitely worse than death of the body.  I have been thinking of her soul. . . .  So here we stand, you and I. You to save her life —­I to save her soul!  What will you do?”

“Why, John, I’d turn Gentile,” he said, with terrible softness.  It was a softness that scorned Shefford for asking, and likewise it flung defiance at his creed and into the face of hell.

Shefford felt the sting and the exaltation.

“And I’d be a Mormon,” he said.

“All right.  We understand each other.  Reckon there won’t be any call for such extremes.  I haven’t an idea what you mean—­what can be done.  But I say, go slow, so we won’t all find graves.  First cheer her up somehow.  Make her want to live.  But go slow, John.  And don’t be with her late!”

. . . . . . . . . . .

That night Shefford found her waiting for him in the moonlight—­a girl who was as transparent as crystal-clear water, who had left off the somber gloom with the black hood, who tremulously embraced happiness without knowing it, who was one moment timid and wild like a half-frightened fawn, and the next, exquisitely half-conscious of what it meant to be thought dead, but to be alive, to be awakening, wondering, palpitating, and to be loved.