her. Yet she had told her father nothing of this, for with her
womanhood had come a new reserve--truths half-divined and others clearly
perceived--which she could not tell any one.

He, in turn, now kept secret from her the delight he felt at her
refusal. He had tried conscientiously to persuade her into the path of
salvation, when his every word was a blade to cut at his heart. Nor was
he happy when she refused so definitely the saving hand extended to her.
To know she was to come short of her glory in the after-time was anguish
to him; and mingling with that anguish, inflaming and aggravating it,
were his own heretical doubts that would not be gone.

In a sheer desperation of bewilderment he longed for the end, longed to
know certainly his own fate and hers--to have them irrevocably fixed--so
that he might no more be torn among many minds, but could begin to pay
his own penalties in plain suffering, uncomplicated by this torturing
necessity to choose between two courses of action.

And the time was, happily, to be short. With the first day of 1870 he
began to wait. With prayer and fasting and vigils he waited. Now was
the day when the earth should be purified by fire, the wicked swept from
the land, and the lost tribes of Israel restored to their own. Now was
to come the Son of Man who should dwell in righteousness with men,
reigning over them on the purified earth for a thousand years.

He watched the mild winter go, with easy faith; and the early spring
come and go, with a dawning uneasiness. For the time was passing with
never the blast of a trumpet from the heavens. He began to see then that
he alone, of all Amalon, had kept his faith pure. For the others had
foolishly sown their fields, as if another crop were to be
harvested,--as if they must continue to eat bread that was earth-grown.
Even Prudence had strangely ceased to believe as he did. Something from
the outside had come, he knew not what nor how, to tarnish the fair gold
of her certainty. She had not said so, but he divined it when he
shrewdly observed that she was seeking to comfort him, to support his
own faith when day after day the Son of Man came not.

"It will surely be in another month, Daddy--perhaps next week--perhaps
to-morrow," she would say cheerfully. "And you did right not to put in
any crops. It would have been wicked to doubt."

He quickly detected her insincerity, seeing that she did not at all
believe. As the summer came and went wi