ed
strain, was great. In her first joy at any, even the least, alleviation of
the horror she had felt at the thought of Stephen's dishonesty, she
over-estimated the extent of the relief she would feel from his
surrendering the money at her request. She wrote as buoyantly, as
confidently, as if his doing that would do away with the whole wrong from
the beginning. In her overflowing, impetuosity, also, she did not consider
what severe and cutting things were implied as well as said in some of her
sentences. She closed the letter without rereading it, hastened to send it
by the first mail, and then began to count the days which must pass before
Stephen's answer could reach her.

Alas for Mercy! this was a sad preparation for the result which was to
follow her hastily written words. It seems sometimes as if fate delighted
in lifting us up only to cast us down, in taking us up into a high
mountain to show us bright and goodly lands, only to make our speedy
imprisonment in the dark valley the harder to bear.

Stephen read this last letter of Mercy's with an ever-increasing sense of
resentment to the very end. For the time being it seemed to actually
obliterate every trace of his love for her. He read the words as
wrathfully as if they had been written by a mere acquaintance.

"Good heavens!" he exclaimed. "'Stolen money! Inform the authorities!'
Let her do it if she likes and see how she would come out at the end of
that.' And Stephen wrote Mercy very much such a letter as he would have
written to a man under the same circumstances. Luckily, he kept it a day,
and, rereading it in a cooler moment was shocked at its tone, destroyed
it, and wrote another. But the second one was no less hard, only more
courteous, than the first. It ran thus:--

"MERCY,--I am sorry that any thing in my last letter should have led you
to suppose that under the existing circumstances you could control my
actions. All I said was that I might, for the sake of your peace of mind,
give up this money, if it were not for my obligations to my mother. It was
a foolish thing to say, since those obligations could not be done away
with. I ought to have known that in your overwrought frame of mind you
would snatch at the suggestion, and make it the basis of a fresh appeal.

"Now let me say, once for all, that my mind is firmly made up on this
subject, and that it must be dropped between us. The money is mine, and I
shall keep it. If you think it your duty t