. And yet--and yet--the shock of the last few days, forcibly as
it vibrated through all her nature, could not eradicate the sympathy of
years--the memories of Hiram and Kirtland, Haun's Mill and the
desperate winter's march. Justice, her old friend, now her inquisitor,
said sternly, "It was in these scenes in which some lost life and some
reason that these men lost their moral standards." But her heart cried,
"Now that _I_ am insulted, I cannot forgive."

The words of the Governor's wife, cheerful, continuous, and not without
diverting sparkle, were an unspeakable rest to Susannah, weary above all
things of herself. Whether because of a strong undercurrent of tactful
kindness, or in mere garrulity, the good lady's talk for some time
flowed on concerning all things small, and nothing great, like the
lapping of the river against the vessel's bows.

But at last her companion's situation grew upon her; she enlarged more
than once upon her surprise at Susannah's advent, and her feelings of
extreme relief that she was safely there.

"What a mercy!" she sighed comfortably. "Such awful people! Why, I hear
that when any child among them is weak or deformed they just murder it."

Like one who is enraged with his own kin but cannot hear them falsely
accused, Susannah contradicted this statement.

"It is perfectly true," the Governor's wife declared. "I have heard it
several times. How long have you been at Nauvoo?"

"Three weeks."

"And in that time they offered to kill you! Well, I assure you if you
had been a sickly child they wouldn't have let you live three days. And
they say that that monster they call the prophet has at least a dozen
wives."

"Oh, no."

"Ten or eleven, at any rate."

"He has only one, and he has always been very kind to her."

"How they have imposed upon you! Where have you been living that you
have not heard more of their iniquitous doings than that?"

Susannah was faint and ill with the conflict within her own breast when
the dapper Kentucky Governor, on business intent, came to them from a
group of the smoking men.

"James," cried his wife, with an edge of sharpness in her low voice,
"this lady doesn't even know a tithe of the enormities that are
practised in Nauvoo."

He shook his head, and said that it was a compliment to Susannah's heart
and mind that the tenth part had been sufficient to alarm.

His manner was stiff and formal, but his disposition seemed very kind.

He asked Susann