“If it will satisfy you, very well!” “My reward will come—I shall do a great work, I shall have a Witness from the sky. Who am I that I should have thought to win a crown without taking up a cross?” “I am sorry for you.” “Oh, Prue, there must be a way to save the souls of such as you, even in their blindness. Would God make a flower like you, only to let it be lost? There must be a way. I shall pray until I force it from the secret heavens.” “My soul will be very well, sir!” she retorted, with a distinct trace of asperity. “I am not a heathen, I’d thank you to remember—and when I’m a wife I shall be my husband’s only wife—” He winced in acutest pain. “You have no right to taunt me so. Else you can’t know what you have meant to me. Oh, you were all the world, child—you, of your own dear self—you would have been all the wives in the world to me—there are many, many of you, and all in a heavenly one—” “Oh, forgive me, dearest,” she cried, and put out a little gloved hand to comfort him. “I know, I know—all the sweetness and goodness of your love, believe me. See, I have kept always by me the little Bible you gave me on my birthday—I have treasured it, and I know it has made me a better girl, because it makes me always think of your goodness—but I couldn’t have gone there, Joel—and it does seem as if you need not have gone—and that marrying is so odious—” “You shall see how little you had to fear of that doctrine which God has seen fit to reveal to these good men. I tell you now, Prue, I shall wed no woman but you. Nor am I giving you up. Don’t think it. I am doing my duty and trusting God to bring you to me. I know He will do it—I tell you there is the spirit of some strange, awful strength in me, which tells me to ask what I will and it shall be given—to seek to do anything, how great or hard soever, and a giant’s, a god’s strength will rest in me. And so I know you will come. You will always think of me so,—waiting for you—somehow, somewhere. Every day you must think it, at any idle moment when I come to your mind; every night when you waken in the dark and silence, you must think, ‘Wherever he is, he is waiting for me, perhaps awake as I am now, praying, with a power that will surely draw me.’ You will come somehow. Perhaps, when I reach winter quarters, you will have changed your mind. One never knows how God may fashion these little providences. But He will bring you safe to me out of that Gentile perdition. Remember, child, God has set his hand in these last days to save the human family from the ruins of the fall, and some way, He alone knows how, you will come to me and find me waiting.” “As if you needed to wait for me when I am here now ready for you, willing to be taken!”