Chapter III.

       The Lute of the Holy Ghost Breaks His Fast

       Table of Contents

      In his cautious approach to the Daggin house, he came upon her unawares—a slight, slender, shapely thing of pink and golden flame, as she poised where the sun came full upon her. One hand clutched her flowing blue skirts snugly about her ankles; the other opened coaxingly to a kitten crouched to spring on the limb of an apple-tree above her. The head was thrown back, the vivid lips were parted, and he heard her laugh low to herself. Near by was a towering rose-bush, from which she had broken the last red rose, large, full, and lush, its petals already loosened. Now she wrenched away a handful of these, and flung them upward at the watchful kitten. The scarlet flecks drifted back around her and upon her. Like little red butterflies hovering in golden sunlight, they lodged in her many-braided yellow hair, or fluttered down the long curls that hung in front of her ears. She laughed again under the caressing shower. Then she tore away the remaining petals and tossed them up with an elf-like daintiness, not at the crouched and expectant kitten this time, but so that the whole red rain floated tenderly down upon her upturned face and into the folds of the white kerchief crossed upon her breast. She waited for the last feathery petal. Her hidden lover saw it lodge in the little hollow at the base of her bare, curved throat. He could hold no longer.

      Stepping from the covert that had shielded him, he called softly to her.

      “Prudence—Prue!”

      She had reached again for the kitten, but at the sound of his low, vigorous note, she turned quickly toward him, colouring with a glow that spread from the corner of the crossed kerchief up to the yellow hair above her brow. She answered with quick breaths.

      “Joel—Joel—Joel!”

      She laughed aloud, clapping her small hands, and he ran to her—over beds of marigolds, heartsease, and lady’s-slippers, through a row of drowsy-looking, heavy-headed dahlias, and past other withering flowers, all but choked out by the rank garden growths of late summer. Then his arms opened and seemed to swallow the leaping little figure, though his kisses fell with hardly more weight upon the yielded face than had the rose-petals a moment since, so tenderly mindful was his ardour. She submitted, a little as the pampered kitten had before submitted to her own pettings.

      “You dear old sobersides, you—how gaunt and careworn you look, and how hungry, and what wild eyes you have to frighten one with! At first I thought you were a crazy man.”

      He held her face up to his eager eyes, having no words to say, overcome by the joy that surged through him like a mighty rush of waters. In the moment’s glorious certainty he rested until she stirred nervously under his devouring look, and spoke.

      “Come, kiss me now and let me go.”

      He kissed her eyes so that she shut them; then he kissed her lips—long—letting her go at last, grudgingly, fearfully, unsatisfied.

      “You scare me when you look that way. You mustn’t be so fierce.”

      “I told him he didn’t know you.”

      “Who didn’t know me, sir?”

      “A man who said I wasn’t sure of you.”

      “So you are sure of me, are you, Mr. Preacherman? Is it because we’ve been sweethearts since so long? But remember you’ve been much away. I’ve seen you—let me count—but one little time of two weeks in three years. You would go on that horrid mission.”

      “Is not religion made up of obedience, let life or death come?”

      “Is there no room for loving one’s sweetheart in it?”

      “One must obey, and I am a better man for having denied myself and gone. I can love you better. I have been taught to think of others. I was sent to open up the gospel in the Eastern States because I had been endowed with almost the open vision. It was my call to help in the setting up of the Messiah’s latter-day kingdom. Besides, we may never question the commands of the holy priesthood, even if our wicked hearts rebel in secret.”

      “If you had questioned the right person sharply enough, you might have had an answer as to why you were sent.”

      “What do you mean? How could I have questioned? How could I have rebelled against the stepping-stone of my exaltation?”

      His face relaxed a little, and he concluded almost quizzically:

      “Was not Satan hurled from high heaven for resisting authority?”

      She pouted, caught him by the lapels of his coat and prettily tried to shake him.

      “There—horrid!—you’re preaching again. Please remember you’re not on mission now. Indeed, sir, you were called back for being too—too—why, do you know, even old Elder Munsel, ‘Fire-brand Munsel,’ they call him, said you were too fanatical.”

      His face grew serious.

      “I’m glad to be called back to you, at any rate,—and yet, think of all those poor benighted infidels who believe there are no longer revelations nor prophecies nor gifts nor healings nor speaking with tongues,—this miserable generation so blind in these last days when the time of God’s wrath is at hand. Oh, I burn in my heart for them, night after night, suffering for the tortures that must come upon them—thrice direful because they have rejected the message of Moroni and trampled upon the priesthood of high heaven, butchering the Saints of the Most High, and hunting the prophets