"But I am married," the words came with a long sobbing sigh.
"Not legally?" and then he added, "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 now, it must have been because he thought to save my soul by it, but I think—I think that the lie could not have been his. I think it must have been Joseph Smith's." She spoke very wistfully.
"What was it?" he asked again, tender of the shock she had received, yet still confident that it would be his part to widen this breach.