t they both did "covenant, promise, and agree to dissolve all the
relations which have hitherto existed between us as husband and wife,
and to keep ourselves separate and apart from each other from this time
forth."

This was the simple divorce which Brigham was good enough to grant to
such of the Saints as found themselves unhappily married, and wished it.
As Joel Rae handed the Prophet the fee of ten dollars, which it was his
custom to charge for the service, Brigham made some timely remarks. He
said he feared that Martha had been perverse and rebellious; that her
first husband had found her so; and that it was doubtless for the good
of all that her second had taken the resolution to divorce her. He was
afraid that Brother Joel was an inferior judge of women; but he had
surely shown himself to be generous in the provision he was making for
the support of this contumacious wife.

They parted outside the door of the little office, and he kissed her for
the first time since they had been married--on the forehead.

CHAPTER XXVII.

_A New Cross Taken up and an Old Enemy Forgiven_

Christina would now be left alone with the cares of the house, and he
knew he ought to have some one to help her. The fever of sacrifice was
also upon him. And so he found another derelict, to whom he was sealed
forever.

At a time of more calmness he might have balked at this one. She was a
cross, to be sure, and it was now his part in life to bear crosses. But
there were plenty of these, and even one vowed to a life of sacrifice,
he suspected, need not grossly abuse the powers of discrimination with
which Heaven had seen fit to endow him. But he had lately been on the
verge of a seething maelstrom, balancing there with unholy desire and
wickedly looking far down, and the need to atone for this sin excited
him to indiscretions.

It was not that this star in his crown was in her late thirties and less
than lovely. He had learned, indeed, that in the game which, for the
chastening of his soul, he now played with the Devil, it were best to
choose stars whose charms could excite to little but conduct of a
saintlike seemliness. The fat, dumpy figure of this woman, therefore,
and her round, flat, moonlike face, her mouse-coloured wisps of hair cut
squarely off at the back of her neck, were points of a merit that was in
its whole effect nothing less than distinguished.

But she talked. Her tones played with the constancy of an ever-liv