dded, "nor in God's sight."

"Yes, yes, oh! you are making a great mistake, Ephraim. Joseph Smith and
my husband are not like that. A minister came and did it. He had his
license, and we have the paper he signed."

Ephraim set his teeth hard together and kept silence. He said to himself
that he might have known that the rascals would be clever enough to make
the tie secure.

Susannah wept on, not loudly, but with long convulsive sighs that broke
into the tears she was endeavouring to check.

"And, Ephraim, my husband is good--oh, very good, and very kind to me,
and up to last night I thought that what he believed might be true. I
was not sure, but I thought that Joseph Smith might be a prophet. I knew
they were far, far better than the other people who despise them, and so
I was glad to be with them; and up till last night" (she repeated the
words, controlling herself to give them emphasis)--"up till last night I
thought that they at least believed everything they said to be true."

Then, after an interval of unthinking pain, Ephraim perceived that if he
had come under a mistaken belief, he had at least come at the right
moment; if the bond of her marriage held, the bond of her delusion was
broken; she had detected some fraud. His hope, dazed by one blow, now
began to look through the circumstance more clearly. If he could lead
her to renounce the religion in which she had apparently ceased to
believe, and persuade her to return to his father's roof, the Mormon
husband himself might seek the dissolution of the marriage. Therefore
Ephraim made no comment on what had passed, but asked gently, "What of
last night, Susy?"

With a great effort she stood up, brushing away her tears, brushing back
with both hands the hair that had fallen about her face. In the shock
which Ephraim's proposal had given, in the brief interval of her tears,
she had realised as never before that she could not shake off her duty
to Angel as she had thought to shake off his creed. She spoke
tremblingly.

"Ephraim, you are so good that you are above us all. You live in some
higher place. You would have made this great sacrifice to help me." (She
never doubted that Ephraim's proposal had been born in self-abnegation.)
"Surely you can tell me what to do, for I am in great distress; but I
want you first to remember that my husband is good, and that he loves me
more than all the world, more than everything except God, and if he has
told me a lie n