that there would leap before his eyes fountains of blood from the
breasts of living women who knelt and clung to the knees of their
slayers--to the knees of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day
Saints; that he would see two spots of white in the dim light of a
morning where the two little girls lay who had been sent for water; that
he would see the two boys taken out to the desert, one to die at once,
the other to wander to a slower death; that before his sinful eyes would
come the dying face of the woman who had loved him and lost her soul
rather than betray him. He knew that, even in celestial realms exalted
beyond the highest visions of their priesthood, his soul would still
burn in this fire that he could not extinguish within his own breast. He
knew that he carried hell as an inseparable part of himself, and that
the forgiveness of no other power could avail him. He no longer feared
God, but himself alone.

From this fire of his own building it seemed to him that he could obtain
surcease only by reducing the self within him. As surely as he let it
feel a want, all the torture came back upon him. When his pride lifted
up its head, when he desired any satisfaction for himself, when he was
tempted for a moment to lay down his cross, the cries came back, the sea
of blood surged before him, and close behind came the shapes that
crawled or moved furtively, ever about to spring in front and turn upon
him. Small wonder, then, that his shoulders bent beneath unseen burdens,
that his air was of one who suffered for all the world, and that they
called him "the little man of sorrows."

With this knowledge he learned to permit himself only one great love, a
love for the child Prudence. He was sure that no punishment could come
through that. It was his day-star and his life, the one pleasure that
brought no suffering with it. She was a child of fourteen now, a