is eyes as from a sight no
man should see. To admire her at this moment, shut away in the
sanctuary of holy thoughts, was a sacrilege. Men and their passions
should stand outside in that sacred hour when a woman is at prayer.
Leff had no such high fancies. He only knew the sight of Susan made
him dumb and drove away all the wits he had. Now she looked so aloof,
so far removed from all accustomed things, that the sense of her
remoteness added gloom to his embarrassment. He twisted a blade of
grass in his freckled hands and wished that the service would soon end.

The cotton-wood leaves made a light, dry pattering as if rain drops
were falling. From the picketed animals, looping their trail ropes
over the grass, came a sound of low, continuous cropping. The hum of
insects swelled and sank, full of sudden life, then drowsily dying away
as though the spurt of energy had faded in the hour's discouraging
languor. The doctor's voice detached itself from this pastoral chorus
intoning the laws that God gave Moses when he was conducting a
stiff-necked and rebellious people through a wilderness:

"Thou shalt do no murder.

"Thou shalt not commit adultery.

"Thou shalt not steal."

And to each command Susan's was the only voice that answered, falling
sweet and delicately clear on the silence:

"Lord have mercy upon us and incline our hearts to keep this law."

Susan praying for power to resist such scarlet sins! It was fantastic
and David wished he dared join his voice to hers and not let her kneel
there alone as if hers was the only soul that needed strengthening.
Susan, the young, the innocent-eyed, the pure.

He had come again the next Sunday--Leff went hunting that morning--and
felt that some day, not so far distant, he would dare to kneel too and
respond. He thought of it when alone, another port that his dreams
were taking him to--his voice and Susan's, the bass and the treble,
strength and sweetness, symbol of the male and the female, united in
one harmonious strain that would stream upward to the throne of the God
who, watching over them, neither slumbered nor slept.

It was on the afternoon of this Sunday, that David started out to walk
to an Indian village, of which a passing emigrant had told him, lying
in a hollow a mile to the westward. He left the camp sunk in the
somnolence of its seventh-day rest, Susan not to be seen anywhere, Leff
asleep under the wagon, the doctor writing his diary in the sha