Faith begging the question is a sight to which the eye of experience becomes accustomed, but Susannah, standing upon the threshold of life, blinked and failed to focus her vision, feeling vaguely that during the last phrase some one had turned a somersault, and that too quickly to be watched.

“Thou wilt think upon these things?” The young Quaker stood in the storm and looked earnestly upon Susannah, who was upon her uncle’s doorstep, within shelter of the brown pent house.

Susannah smiled.  It was a perfectly instinctive smile, not one self-conscious thought went behind or before.  She smiled because the young man was comely, and because she was young and wanted companionship.

“I don’t know,” she said with perfect frankness; “my aunt will be so vexed with me when she hears that I’ve been to the Smiths that I don’t believe I’ll be allowed to think of anything this good while.”

Her smile, her girlishness, seemed at last to pierce beneath the armour of his devout abstraction.  Fortune at work chooses her a fine-edged instrument, and Joseph Smith, with unerring but probably half conscious instinct, had sent the right messenger.  The cloud of serious intent on the youth’s face broke now into a sudden admiring glance, half playful yet fully earnest.  His gray eyes held for a moment gracious parley with hers.  “Wilt thou,” he asked, still smiling, “give it as excuse in the day of judgment that they would not let thee think?”

“N-n-no.”  She was more struck with the inadequacy of the excuse than with the fact that she had a better one if she had chosen to give it.

He was again grave, but he was not now unappreciative.  “Thou art very fair, and beauty to a young woman is, no doubt, a great snare.  I will wrestle in prayer for thee.”

He was going down the brick walk between the masses of drenched flowers.  “Don’t,” cried Susannah faintly, “don’t do that.”  But he did not hear her.

CHAPTER IV.

The wind that in the hurly-burly out of doors had been a cheerful if boisterous enemy, seemed suddenly transformed into a wailing spirit when Susannah was making her way up the stairs of the darkening wooden house.  Its master and mistress had not yet returned from burying the dead.  The girl made her way up to Ephraim’s room.  The books were left open upon the table; no one was there.

It was a new thing that Ephraim should breast a storm.

Susannah trudged downstairs again and dried her bedraggled skirts at the fire—­an empty house, a dreary wailing wind, and gathering twilight for her sole companions.

At length a step was heard.  Ephraim came in bearing Susannah’s rain cloak and goloshes.  He was wet, pale, and breathless, but he would not betray his weakness and excitement by a word.

“You were looking for me, Ephraim, and some one told you that I had come home.  Did you hear who brought me?  O Ephraim!  I have been out walking with the false prophet, and then with one of his disciples.”  Susannah, sitting by the fire, looked at him trying to smile through his gloom.