“And you,” she said slowly, “you have poured out blood and soul for us all freely, but why?” The imperious need of truth awoke again.  “Why have you let yourself be beaten and shot at and imprisoned and horribly threatened, to lead us all to this new Zion, wherever it may be?” She repeated the question.  “If it was ambition, why did you hold to it when there did not seem to be the slightest chance that your sect could survive, or that you would escape death?”

She was asking with more heart in her tone now that she had been made to realise what she had of respect and friendship for this man.

“I hain’t got the courage most people think I have,” he replied sadly; “I am scared enough; I am scared sometimes of the very water I go into to baptize in, let alone men that want to murder me; but I am more afraid to go against my revelations, for I know if I went against them there would be nothing for me but the pit and eternal fire.  I don’t say that it would be the same for any of you.  I used to preach that it would, but in prison, when I thought of my folks standing up to be killed, I thought perhaps I had gone beyond what was told me in preaching that way; but as for me, I’ve seen and I’ve heard.”

He did not turn or take restless steps upon the floor.  It would have been a relief to her if he had moved; but he remained just where he first stood, strong enough to have this colloquy over without restlessness.

“I am no saint,” he said, “as you know very well, and there’s a lot of things I’ve done, thinking that my revelations told me, which I don’t know whether they told me or not, for in prison I saw that the things were bad things, like that mess of the bank, and running away as I did.  I guess I could not have been living right, and the devil gulled me.  But that hain’t got nothing to do with the times I know that the Lord spoke.  You don’t believe it was the Lord at all.  Well, then, who was it?  For it’s the same as has told me not to do the lots of wicked things I might have done and didn’t.  As to them plates, I told you before I didn’t have them as much in my hands as I said I did.  I got wrong a bit there too, maybe, but it isn’t easy to keep quite straight between the thing you see and the words you say it in, when you are trying to talk to people about what they don’t understand.  It isn’t easy to do just only what is perfectly right about anything at any time, at least, if it is to you, it isn’t to me; but I often thought I was born worse than most people.”

“The men who were your witnesses as to the reality of the plates are apostate,” she said gently.

“They are apostate,” he said gloomily, “and why?  Because I would not let them live upon the Lord’s tithes without labouring as we all laboured.”

He spoke again after a moment.  “The Gentiles have spread abroad a story about one Solomon Spalding, who they say wrote the Book of Mormon, which Rigdon stole, but you know—­you who have been with us from the beginning—­that neither I nor your husband nor any one of us saw Rigdon until we came to Kirtland, and if his word is to be believed he never saw this Spalding or his book.”