“I love Marion,” she breathed softly.  “I would help you—­I would help her—­if I could.”  For a moment her pale beautiful face was filled with a light that might have shone from the face of an angel, “Don’t you understand?” she continued, scarcely above a whisper.  “I have been Strang’s one great love—­his life—­until Marion came into his heart.  I have lost—­you have lost—­but mine is the more bitter because Marion loves you, and Strang—­”

With a cry Nathaniel sprang to her side.  The candle fell from his hand, sputtered on the floor, and left them in darkness.

“Marion loves me!  You say that Marion loves me?”

The woman’s voice came to him in a whisper filled with the sweetness of sympathy.

“She said so to-night—­in this room.  She told me that she loved you as she never thought that she could love a man in this world.  O, my God, is that not a balm for your heart, if it is broken?  And Strang—­my Strang—­has forgotten his love for me!”

Nathaniel reached out his arms.  They found the woman and for a time he held her hands in his, while a great silence fell upon them.  He could hear the sobbing of her breath and as her fingers tightened about his own his heart seemed bursting with its hatred of this man who called himself a prophet of God; a hatred that burned furiously even as his being throbbed with the wild joy of the words he had just heard.

“Where is Marion?” he pleaded.

“I don’t know,” replied the woman.  “They took her away alone.  The others have gone to the temple.”

“Do you think she is at the temple?” he inquired insistently.

“No.  One of the others came back a little while ago.  She said that Marion was not there.”

“Where is Strang?”

This time he felt the woman tremble.

“Strang—­”

She drew her hands away from him.  There was a strange quiver in her voice.

“Yes—­where is Strang?”

There came no reply.

“Tell me—­where is he?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is he at the temple?”

“I don’t know.”

He could hear her stifled breath; he could almost feel her trembling, an arm’s reach out there in the darkness.  What a woman was this whose heart the Mormon king had broken for a new love!

“Listen,” he said gently.  “I am going to find Marion.  I am going to take her away.  To-morrow you shall have Strang again—­if he is alive!”

There was no answer and he moved slowly back to the door.  He closed it after him as he entered the hall.  Once in the big room he paused for a moment under the hanging lamp to examine his pistol and then went outside.  The grove in which the castle stood was absolutely deserted.  So far as he could see not even a guard watched over the property of the king.  Nathaniel had become too accustomed to the surprises of Beaver Island to wonder at this.  He could see by the lights flaring along the harbor that the castle was in an isolated position and easy of attack.  From what Strang’s wife had told him and the evidences of panic in the chambers of the harem he believed that the Mormon king had abandoned the castle to its fate and that the approaching conflict would center about the temple.