ive you pain. How I can, I don't see,
when I long so to make you happy always."

"You do give me great, unutterable happiness, Mercy," he replied. "I never
think of the pain: I only think of the joy," and he laid her hand on his
lips. "All the pain that you could possibly give me in a lifetime could
not outweigh the joy of one such moment as this, when you say that you
love me."

These days were unspeakably hard for Stephen. He had grown during the past
year to so live on the sight and in the blessedness of Mercy that to be
shut away from them was simply a sort of dying. There was no going back
for him to the calm routine of the old life before she came. He was
restless and wretched: he walked up and down in front of the house every
night, watching the shadow of her figure on the curtains of her mother's
room. He made all manner of excuses, true and false, reasonable and
unreasonable, to speak to her for a moment at the door in the morning. He
carried the few verses in his pocket-book she had given him; and, although
he knew them nearly by heart, he spent long hours in his office turning
the little papers over and over. Some of them were so joyous that they
stirred in him almost a bitter incredulity as he read them in these days
of loss and pain. One was a sonnet which she had written during a two
days' absence of his,--his only absence from his mother's house for six
years. Mercy had been astonished at her sense of loneliness in these two
days. "O Stephen," she had said, when he came back, "I am honestly ashamed
of having missed you so much. Just the knowing that you wouldn't be here
to come in, in the evenings, made the days seem a thousand years long, and
this is what came of it."

And she gave him this sonnet:--

TO AN ABSENT LOVER.

That so much change should come when them dost go,
Is mystery that I cannot ravel quite.
The very house seems dark as when the light
Of lamps goes out. Each wonted thing doth grow
So altered, that I wander to and fro,
Bewildered by the most familiar sight,
And feel like one who rouses in the night
From dream of ecstasy, and cannot know
At first if he be sleeping or awake,
My foolish heart so foolish for thy sake
Hath grown, dear one!
Teach me to be more wise.
I blush for all my foolishness doth lack;
I fear to seem a coward in thine eyes.
Teach me, dear one,--but first thou must come back!

Another was a little poem, which she laughingly c