gh for her." And he went away, visibly discomposed.

Mrs. Vint repeated this conversation to Mercy, and told her Thomas
Leicester was certainly in love with her. "Shouldst have seen his face,
girl, when I told him Paul and you were sweethearts. 'T was as if I had
run a knife in his heart."

Mercy murmured a few words of doubt; but she kissed her mother
eloquently, and went about, rosy and beaming, all that afternoon.

As for Griffith, his gratitude and his jealousy were now at war, and
caused him a severe mental struggle.

Carrick, too, was spurred by jealousy, and came every day to the house,
and besieged Mercy; and Griffith, who saw them together, and did not
hear Mercy's replies, was excited, irritated, alarmed.

Mrs. Vint saw his agitation, and determined to bring matters to a
climax. She was always giving him a side thrust; and, at last, she told
him plainly that he was not behaving like a man. "If the girl is not
good enough for you, why make a fool of her, and set her against a good
husband?" And when he replied she was good enough for any man in
England, "Then," said she, "why not show your respect for her as Paul
Carrick does? He likes her well enough to go to church with her."

With the horns of this dilemma she so gored Kate Peyton's husband that,
at last, she and Paul Carrick, between them, drove him out of his
conscience.

So he watched his opportunity and got Mercy alone. He took her hand and
told her he loved her, and that she was his only comfort in the world,
and he found he could not live without her.

At this she blushed and trembled a little, and leaned her brow upon his
shoulder, and was a happy creature for a few moments.

So far, fluently enough; but then he began to falter and stammer, and
say that for certain reasons he could not marry at all. But if she could
be content with anything short of that, he would retire with her into a
distant country, and there, where nobody could contradict him, would
call her his wife, and treat her as his wife, and pay his debt of
gratitude to her by a life of devotion.

As he spoke, her brow retired an inch or two from his shoulder; but she
heard him quietly out, and then drew back and confronted him, pale, and,
to all appearance, calm.

"Call things by their right names," said she. "What you offer me this
day, in my father's house, is, to be your mistress. Then--God forgive
you, Thomas Leicester."

With this oblique and feminine reply, and one loo