blood should be shed; but the truth was plain.  They had shed innocent blood that day in the Meadows.  Now the Lord’s favour was withdrawn and His coming deferred, perhaps another thousand years.  The torture of the thing came back to him with all its early colouring, so that his days and nights were full of anguish.  He no longer dared open the Bible to that reddened page.  The cries already rang in his ears, and he knew not what worse torture might come if he looked again upon the stain; nor could he free himself from these by the old expedient of prayer, for he could no longer pray with an honest heart; he was no longer unselfish, could no longer kneel in perfect submission; he was wholly bound to this child of her mother, and the peace of absolute and utter sacrifice could not come back to him.  Full of unrest, feeling that somehow the end, at least for him, could not be far off, he went north to the April Conference.  He took Prudence with him, not daring to leave her behind.

She went with high hopes, alive with new sensations.  Another world lay outside her valley of the mountains, and she was going to peep over the edge at its manifold fascinations.  She had been there before as a child; now she was going as a woman.  She remembered the city, bigger and grander than fifty Amalons, with magnificent stores filled with exotic novelties and fearsome luxuries from the land of the wicked Gentile.  She recalled even the strange advertisements and signs, from John and Enoch Reese, with “All necessary articles of comfort for the wayfarer, such as flour, hard bread, butter, eggs and vinegar, buckskin pants and whip-lashes,” to the “Surgeon Dentist from Berlin and Liverpool,” who would “Examine and Extract Teeth, besides keeping constantly on hand a supply of the Best Matches, made by himself.”  From William Hennefer, announcing that, “In Connection with my Barber Shop, I have just opened an Eating House, where Patrons will be Accommodated with every Edible Luxury the Valley Affords,” to William Nixon, who sold goods for cash, flour, or wheat “at Jacob Hautz’s house on the southeast corner of Council-House Street and Emigration Square, opposite to Mr. Orson Spencer’s.”

She remembered the hunters and trappers in bedraggled buckskin, the plainsmen with revolvers in their belts, wearing the blue army cloak, the teamsters in leathern suits, and horsemen in fur coats and caps, buffalo-hide boots with the hair outside, and rolls of blankets behind their high Mexican saddles.

More fondly did she recall two wonderful evenings at the theatre.  First had been the thrilling “Robert Macaire,” then the romantic “Pizarro,” in which Rolla had been a being of such overwhelming beauty that she had felt he could not be of earth.

This time her visit was an endless fever of discovery in a realm of magic and mystery, of joys she had supposed were held in reserve for those who went behind the veil.  It was a new and greater city she came to now, where were buildings of undreamed splendour, many of them reaching dizzily three stories above the earth.  And the shops were more fascinating than ever.  She still shuddered at the wickedness of the Gentiles, but with a certain secret respect for their habits of luxury and their profusion of devices for adornment.