had never heard of crystal-gazing; the phrase “mental automatism” had not then been invented by the psychologists; still less could she suspect that she herself might have come partially under the influence of hypnotic suggestion.  The large kindliness of the new prophet, the steady sobriety and childlikeness of his demeanour, the absence of any appearance of policy or premeditation, were not in harmony with fraud or madness.  Her gentle intelligence was puzzled, as all the candid historians of this man have since been puzzled.  Then, tired of the puzzle, she fell again to contemplating scraps of his speech, which, having a Scriptural sound, suggested piety.  “She shall be told the thing that she shall do for the salvation of her soul,” “She is chosen to go through suffering and grief for a little space.”  How strange if, impossible as it might seem, these words had come to her—­to her—­direct from the mind of the Almighty!

CHAPTER VI.

Some days after this Susannah sat alone at the window of the family room, the long white seam on which she was at work enveloping her knees.

Far off on the horizon the cumulous clouds lay with level under-ridges, their upper outlines softly heaped in pearly lights and shades of dun and gray.  Beneath them the hilly line of the forest was broken distinctly against the cloud by the spikes of giant pines.  That far outline was blue, not the turquoise blue of the sky above the clouds, but the blue that we see on cabbage leaves, or such blue as the moonlight makes when it falls through a frosted pane—­steel blue, so full of light as to be luminous in itself.  From this the nearer contour of the forest emerged, painted in green, with patches and streaks of russet; the nearer groves were beginning to change colour, and, vivid in the sunlight, the fields were yellow.  From the top of a low hill which met the sky came the white road winding over rise and hollow till it passed the door.  Who has not felt the invitation, silent, persistent, of a road that leads through a lonely land to the unseen beyond the hill?

Susannah was again alone in the house; this time Ephraim was absent with his mother, and her uncle was at the mill.  On the white road she saw a man approaching whose dress showed him to be Smith’s Quaker convert, Angel Halsey, a name she had conned till it had become familiar.  He did not pass, but opened the gate of the small garden path and came up between the two borders of sweet-smelling box.  In the garden China asters, zenias, and prince’s feather, dahlias, marigolds, and love-lies-bleeding were falling over one another in luxuriant waste.  The young man neither looked to night nor to left.  He scanned the house eagerly, and his eyes found the window at which Susannah sat.  He stepped across the flowers and stood, his blonde face upturned, below the open sash.  Under his light eyebrows his hazel eyes shone with a singularly bright and exalted expression.