Since she had made up her mind to disobey she had said nothing further to Angel. Why inflict upon him the painful attempt to hinder her which his conscience would demand? The last snow-wreath had faded, but there was not as yet a bud or blade of perfect green. The valley of the Chagrin lay almost hueless in the cold sunshine. A light wind was blowing over its levels of standing weeds, and whispering in the bare arms of the huge nut-trees upon its bluffs. When the sun began to sink, Susannah had reached the low rolling ground that surrounds Hiram. The landscape here had a less distinctive character, and there was no vapour in the sky to make the sunset beautiful. She was weary of her horse's rough trot, and still more so of its slow plodding, but she felt excitement. She had conquered those forces, part of her womanhood, which urged compliance with her husband's desire and her own desire to abide by the homely routine whatever it might be. The thing that she had done seemed so large that her imagination told her that the event must justify it. She had no thought of concealment. She knew only the two families in the village of Hiram. Her plan was to go first to the Rigdons and ask for refreshment, thence to the meeting, and after that to ask for the night's lodging which she knew that Emma Smith would not refuse. In the village she saw that people were moving about and talking with an air of excitement. When she turned to a quiet corner and asked an elderly man for Mrs. Rigdon's house, he stared at her as if at an apparition. "Is it Sydney Rigdon's wife that you're wanting?" Susannah had raised her veil, and he looked at her face with the greatest curiosity. Flushed with exercise, braced by the sharp air, her colour was brilliant and her eyes sparkling. Her plain dress and heavy veil appeared to the man to be a disguise, so surprising to him was the brilliancy of her face and the modulation of her voice. "Do you not know where the Rigdons live?" she asked. He was chewing tobacco, and now he spat upon the ground, not rudely, but as performing an habitual action in a moment of abstracted thought. "Oh, I know well enough, but if ye won't mind my saying a word to ye, young lady, I'd advise ye to put up somewhere else. I've got darters of my own--in course I don't know who ye may be or what ye may be doing here." This last was added in an apparent attempt to attain to some suspicion that he felt to be reasonable. "You think ill of them because you despise their sect," she said gently, "but I am the wife of one of the elders." "Have ye got hold of some news that ye're carrying to them?" He evinced a sudden interest that appeared to her extraordinary. "What news?" "Oh, _I_ don't know. I jest thought 'twas queer, if you'd got hold of anybody's secrets, that you should be asking where they lived, straight out and open in the street like this."