at a premium, it was easy for her to do what was
reckoned of more value than what she received. The old man had two sons.
The elder and his wife were in the prime of life, having a large family;
the younger son was unmarried. The farm was large and prosperous. The
one woman, even had she been less amiable, would have naturally desired
to keep Susannah as a helper; being the kindly soul she was, she
reserved the more attractive tasks for her, and bade the children call
her endearing names. In her blindness, in her slow recovery from utter
exhaustion of mind and nerve, Susannah never thought of connecting this
long-continued kindness with the fact that the old man's younger son had
as yet no wife.

At first Susannah had fixed her thoughts upon an immediate return to the
east, but weeks went by and she had not written to Ephraim Croom for
the money that she needed. The whole civilised world contained for her
but one friend to whom she would write.

The Canadian farm, the remote country village of Manchester, and the
Mormon sect--these formed her whole experience. Her father, who had
scolded and played with her; Ephraim, who had understood her and had
been the authority to her heart that his parents could not be; her
husband, who had wrapped about her such close protection that she had
tottered when she thought to walk alone--these were her real world, and
of them only Ephraim was left.

It was not in her nature at any time, above all not in these stricken
months, to desire to go out into the world alone to make for herself a
sphere of usefulness and a circle of companions. Hence she thought only
of returning to Ephraim, and by his help obtaining some occupation by
which she could live simply and within his reach. But when she thought
more closely of throwing herself, as it were, penniless and desolate at
the feet of this one prized friendship, doubts arose about her path.

One thing which she had lost in the broken camp by her husband's grave,
one that if she had had greater power of recollection she would not have
left behind in that complete breaking with the past, was a packet of the
few letters which Ephraim had from time to time written to her. She did
not know whether she had thrown them into the grave with her treasure,
or whether they were left a prey to fire and theft, but in her heart she
had carried them beyond the loss of their material existence.

The first had answered her insistent question concerning t