ge, under conditions which were certainly very
hard for Mrs. Jacobs, inasmuch as one-half the interest has always been
paid. This money which you have found would have paid nearly the whole of
the original loan. It was hers, only she did not know where it lay. O
Stephen, my darling, I do implore you not to do this great wrong. You will
certainly come to see, sooner or later, that it was a dishonest act; and
then it will be too late to undo it. If I thought that by talking with you
I could make you see it as I do, I would come to you at once. But I keep
clinging to the hope that you will see it of yourself, that a sudden
realization of it will burst upon you like a great light. Don't speak so
angrily to me of calling you a thief. I never used the word. I never
could. I know the act looks to you right, or you would not commit it. But
it is terrible to me that it should look so to you. I feel, darling, as if
you were color-blind, and I saw you about to pick a most deadly fruit,
whose color ought to warn every one from touching it; but you, not seeing
the color, did not know the danger; and I must save you at all hazards, at
all costs. Oh, what shall I say, what shall I say! How can I make you see
the truth? God help us if I do not; for such an act as this on your part
would put an impassable gulf between our souls for ever. Your loving,

"MERCY."

Stephen's letter was in curter phrase. Writing was not to him a natural
form of expression. Even of joyous or loving words he was chary, and much
more so of their opposites. His life-long habit of repression of all signs
of annoyance, all complaints, all traces of suffering, told still more on
his written words than on his daily speech and life. His letter sounded
harder than it need for this reason; seemed to have been written in
antagonism rather than in grief, and so did injustice to his feeling.

"MY DEAR MERCY,--It is always a mistake for people to try to impose their
own standards of right and wrong on others. It gives me very great pain to
wound you in any way, you know that; and to wound you in such a way as
this gives me the greatest possible pain. But I cannot make your
conscience mine. If this money had not seemed to me to be justly my own, I
should never have thought of taking it. As it does seem to me to be justly
my own, your believing it to be another's ought not to change my action.
If I had only my own future to consider, I might give it up, for the sake
of your