not reality."
She paused, eager question in tone and look, but the question was of the
head, not of the heart.

He knew that; he knew that it did not matter greatly to this thoughtful
and beautiful woman whether he had sunk to the deepest degradation or
not. Suddenly he answered her, but not as one who stood at her judgment
bar.

"Where is your heart? Didn't you see how that man Angel--angel of purity
if ever one walked in human form--kissed every day the ground you
walked upon? And you did not love him. The child--you thought you cared
for the child: I tell you if I had had a child like that, with eyes like
the stars and a little mind so untainted, I had laid myself down on his
grave and died there. There's Emmar and me, we'd be in more trouble if
you lost one of your pretty fingers than you would have been in if they
had taken and killed us over there in Missouri." He added, "If you were
another woman, and had not the power to do more than just have a little
shallow caring for one and another, where would be your sin?"

Something that she had dimly suspected of herself flashed into apparent
truth. Ephraim, too, had perhaps intended to tell her this when he had
said that love, not knowledge, was needed. She had not loved Halsey and
his child as she might have loved.

Susannah had always recognised a certain bigness in Smith's character
because of the power he had of giving himself to man, woman, and child;
now she felt her own inferiority. Was she to stand babbling to him about
hallucinations and gold plates? The man in him had flashed out at her,
and because she was not without the heart whose whereabouts he had
demanded, the flash awakened an answering fire. Her cheeks flushed, not
with self-consciousness, but with the slow gathering of heart-stricken
tears.

"And you," she said slowly, "you have poured out blood and soul for us
all freely, but why?" The imperious need of truth awoke again. "Why have
you let yourself be beaten and shot at and imprisoned and horribly
threatened, to lead us all to this new Zion, wherever it may be?" She
repeated the question. "If it was ambition, why did you hold to it when
there did not seem to be the slightest chance that your sect could
survive, or that you would escape death?"

She was asking with more heart in her tone now that she had been made to
realise what she had of respect and friendship for this man.

"I hain't got the courage most people think I have," he replied