ng,
As I sail by with colors flying!

There was great injustice to Stephen in this poem. When he read it, he
groaned, and exclaimed aloud, "O Mercy! O Mercy!" Then, as he read it over
again, he said, "Surely she could not have meant herself in this: it is
only dramatic. She could never call me her foe." Mercy had often said to
him of some of her most intense poems, "Oh, it was purely dramatic. I just
fancied how anybody would feel under such circumstances;" and he clung to
the hope that it was true in this case. But it was not. Already Mercy had
a sense of antagonism, of warfare, with Stephen, or rather with her love
for him. Already her pride was beginning to array itself in reticence, in
withdrawal, in suppression. More than once she had said to herself "I can
live without him! I could bear that pain better than this." More than once
she had asked herself with a kind of terror, "Do I really wish ever to see
Stephen again?" and had been forced to own in her secret thought that she
shrank from meeting him. She began even to consider the possibility of
deferring the visit to Lizzy Hunter, which she had promised to make in the
spring. As the time drew nearer, her unwillingness to go increased, and
she would no doubt have discovered some way of escape; but one day early
in March a telegram came to her, which left her no longer any room for
choice.

It ran:--

"Uncle Dorrance is not expected to live. He wishes to see you. He is at my
house. Come immediately.

"LIZZY HUNTER."

Chapter XIII.

Within six hours after the receipt of this telegram, Mercy was on her way
to Penfield. Her journey would take a night and part of a day. As the
morning dawned, and she drew near the old familiar scenes, her heart was
wrung with conflicting memories and hopes and fears. The whole landscape
was dreary: the fields were dark and sodden, with narrow banks of
discolored snow lying under the fences, and thin rims of ice along the
edges of the streams and pools. The sky was gray; the bare trees were
gray: all life looked gray and hopeless to Mercy. She had had an
over-mastering presentiment from the moment when she read the telegram
that she should reach Penfield too late to see Parson Dorrance alive. A
strange certainty that he had died in the night settled upon her mind as
soon as she waked from her troubled sleep; and when she reached Lizzy's
door, and saw standing before it the undertaker's wagon, which she so well
rememb