“And has the other party in your sect no strength to resist?”

“Very little strength, sir, except that God is on the side of the righteous; but Mrs. Smith, the prophet’s widow, with his sons and many hundreds of us, will not give in to the evil, but will stay in Illinois and Missouri in face of the worst that persecution can do, for it was thereabouts that the prophet said that the Holy City should be, and he gave us no word to kill and destroy our fellow-men; and although perhaps he was led away and sinned sometimes as other men do, it is a scandalous lie to say that he thought to teach wickedness and falsehood to his Church.”

“I wonder,” asked Ephraim within himself, “if that is true, or what strange secret that troubled soul took with him to the other side of death?”

In the evening after the stranger was gone Susannah sat with Ephraim in the old doorway.  Before them, mid the harvest fields, winding over hill and dale, lay the long white road which led to the hill of Smith’s early visions—­the road on which Susannah had set forth with Angel Halsey on her wedding journey.

“You are a-weary, wife, to-night,” said Ephraim.  He smoothed the hair upon her brow.  “You have exhausted yourself with long weeping, and yet—­”

He did not say, “Have you reason to bemoan this man’s tragic end?” for he knew that more sacred memories had caused the tears; of these some faint jealousy rose in his breast and kindness sealed his lips.

She told him the truth in very simple words such as loving women use.

“To-day I seemed to see” (she laid her hand across her knit brows) “all the passion of it again, the wrong, the right, the misery—­from the day that Angel and I went out with such young passionate desire to divide the right from the wrong.  I could see Angel and my baby shot before my eyes as Joseph Smith was shot.  It is terrible to see death come that way.  But they are all three lying now in the perfect peace of death.”  She put her hand in his.  “Then, dear, my mind came back, from the rage and terror of war.  I thought of their peace and of you—­how God has healed my life by your love, and given me such joy.  Is he not able to provide for the healing of the nations?”

THE END.