“Will not marry Strang!  Isn’t that plain?”

“You have guessed nothing—­no cause for the prophet’s power over your sister?” asked Nathaniel.

“Absolutely nothing.  And yet that influence is such that at times the thought of it freezes the blood in my veins.  It is so great that Strang did not hesitate to throw me into jail on the pretext that I had threatened his life.  Marion implored him to spare me the disgrace of a public whipping and he replied by reading to her the commandments of the kingdom.  That was last night—­when you saw her through the window.  Strang is madly infatuated with her beauty and yet he dares to go to any length without fear of losing her.  She has become his slave.  She is as completely in his power as though bound in iron chains.  And the most terrible thing about it all is that she has constantly urged me to leave the island—­to go, and never return.  Great God, what does it all mean?  I love her more than anything else on earth, we have been inseparable since the day she was old enough to toddle alone—­and yet she would have me leave her!  No power on earth can reveal the secret that is torturing her.  No power can make Strang divulge it.”

“And Obadiah Price!” cried Nathaniel, sudden excitement flashing in his eyes.  “Does he not know?”

“I believe that he does!” replied Neil, pacing back and forth in his agitation.  “Captain Plum, if there is a man on this island who loves Marion with all of a father’s devotion it is Obadiah Price, and yet he swears that he knows nothing of the terrible influence which has so suddenly enslaved her to the prophet!  He suggests that it may be mesmerism, but I—­” He interrupted himself with a harsh, mirthless laugh.  “Mesmerism be damned!  It’s not that!”

“Your sister—­is—­a Mormon,” ventured Nathaniel, remembering what the prophet had said to him that morning.  “Could it be her faith?—­a message revealed through Strang from—­”

Neil stopped him almost fiercely.

“Marion is not a Mormon!” he said.  “She hates Mormonism as she hates Strang.  I have tried to get her to leave the island with me but she insists on staying because of the old folk.  They are very old, Captain Plum, and they believe in the prophet and his Heaven as you and I believe in that blue sky up there.  The day before I was arrested I begged my sister to flee to the mainland with me but she refused with the words that she had said to me a hundred times before—­’Neil, I must marry the prophet!’ Don’t you see there is nothing to do—­but to kill Strang?”

Nathaniel thrust his hand into a pocket of the coat he had loaned to Neil and drew forth his pipe and tobacco pouch.  As he loaded the pipe he looked squarely into the other’s eyes and smiled.

“Neil,” he said softly.  “Do you know that you would have made an awful fool of yourself if I hadn’t hove in sight just when I did?”

He lighted his pipe with exasperating coolness, still smiling over its bowl.