against each other, and would be found equally strong.

Mercy took counsel with herself now, and delayed answering this second
letter. She was resolved to be just to Stephen.

"I will think this thing over and over," she said to herself, "till I am
sure past all doubt that I am right, before I say another word."

But her long thinking did not help Stephen. Each day her conviction grew
deeper, her perception clearer, her sense of alienation from Stephen
profounder. If a moral antagonism had grown up between them in any other
shape, it would have been less fatal to her love. There were many species
of wrong-doing which would have been less hateful in her sight. It seemed
to her sometimes that there could be no crime in the world which would
appear to her so odious as this. Her imagination dwelt on the picture of
the lonely old woman in the alms-house. She had been several times to see
Mrs. Jacobs, and had been much moved by a certain grim stoicism which gave
almost dignity to her squalor and wretchedness.

"She always had the bearing of a person who knew she was suffering
wrongly, but was too proud to complain," thought Mercy. "I wonder if she
did not all along believe there was something wrong about the mortgage?"
and Mercy's suspicious thoughts and conjectures ran far back into the
past, fastening on the beginnings of all this trouble. She recollected old
Mr. Wheeler's warnings about Stephen, in the first weeks of her stay in
Penfield. She recollected Parson Dorrance's expression, when he found out
that she had paid her rent in advance. She tortured herself by reviewing
minutely every little manoeuvre she had known of Stephen's practising to
conceal his relation with her.

Let Mercy once distrust a person in one particular, and she distrusted him
in all. Let one act of his life be wrong, and she believed that his every
act was wrong in motive, or in relation to others, however specious and
fair it might be made to appear. All the old excuses and apologies she had
been in the habit of making for Stephen's insincerities to his mother and
to the world seemed to her now less than nothing; and she wondered how she
ever could have held them as sufficient. In vain her heart pleaded. In
vain tender memories thrilled her, by their vivid recalling of hours, of
moments, of looks and words. It was with a certain sense of remorse that
she dwelt on them, of shame that she was conscious of clinging to them
still. "I shall always lo