y I say, let mine handmaid
forgive my servant Joseph his trespasses and then shall she be forgiven
her trespasses."

This was the calumny the Gentile gossips back in Nauvoo would have had
the world believe,--that this great doctrine of the Church had been
given to silence the enraged wife of a man detected in sin.

But in the midst of his questionings he seemed to see a truth,--that
another snare had been set for him by the Devil, and that this time it
had caught his feet. He, who knew that he must have nothing for himself,
had all unconsciously so set his heart upon this child of her mother
that he could not give her up. And now so fixed and so great was his
love that he could not turn back. He knew he was lost. To cling to her
would be to question, doubt, and to lose his faith. To give her up would
kill him.

But at least for a little while he could put it off.

CHAPTER XXX.

_How the World Did not Come to an End_

In doubt and fear, the phantom of a dreadful certainty creeping always
closer, the final years went by. When the world came to be in its very
last days, when the little bent man was drooping lower than ever, and
Prudence was seventeen, there came another Prince of Israel to save her
into the Kingdom while there was yet a time of grace. On this occasion
the suitor was no less a personage than Bishop Warren Snow, a holy man
and puissant, upon whom the blessed Gods had abundantly manifested their
favour. In wives and children, in flocks and herds, he was rich; while,
as to spiritual worth, had not that early church poet styled him the
Entablature of Truth?

But Prudence Rae, once so willing to be saved by the excellent Wild Ram
of the Mountains, had fled in laughing confusion from this later
benefactor, when he had made plain one day the service he sought to do
her soul. A moment later he had stood before her father in all his years
of patriarchal dignity, hale, ruddy, and vast of girth.

"She's a woman now, Brother Snow,--free to choose for herself," the
father had replied to his first expostulations.

"Counsel her, Brother Rae." In the mind of the Bishop, "counsel,"
properly applied, was a thing not long to be resisted.

"She would treat my counsel as shortly as she treated your proposal,
Brother Snow."

The Entablature of Truth glanced out of the open door to where Tom
Potwin could be seen, hastening importantly upon his endless and
mysterious errands, starting off abruptly a little wa