It was a turning-point in Mercy’s
life when she met Parson Dorrance. Here at last
was a man who had strength enough to influence her,
culture enough to teach her, and the firm moral rectitude
which her nature so inexorably demanded. During
the first few weeks of their acquaintance, Mercy was
conscious of an insatiable desire to be in his presence:
it was an intellectual and a moral thirst. Nothing
could be farther removed from the absorbing consciousness
which passionate love feels of its object, than was
this sentiment she felt toward Parson Dorrance.
If he had been a being from another planet, it could
not have been more so. In fact, it was very much
as if another planet had been added to her world,-a
planet which threw brilliant light into every dark
corner of this one. She questioned him eagerly.
Her old doubts and perplexities, which Mr. Allen’s
narrower mind had been unable to comprehend or to
help, were now set at rest and cleared up by a spiritual
vision far keener than her own. Her mind was fed
and trained by an intellect so much stronger than her
own that it compelled her assent and her allegiance.
She came to him almost as a maiden, in the ancient
days of Greece, would have gone to the oracle of the
holiest shrine. Parson Dorrance in his turn was
as much impressed by Mercy; but he was never able
to see in her simply the pupil, the questioner.
To him she was also a warm and glowing personality,
a young and beautiful woman. Parson Dorrance’s
hair was white as snow; but his eyes were as keen
and dark as in his youth, his step as firm, and his
pulse as quick. Long before he dreamed of such
a thing, he might have known, if he had taken counsel
of his heart, that Mercy was becoming to him the one
woman in the world. There was always this peculiarity
in Mercy’s influence upon all who came to love
her. She was so unique and incalculable a person
that she made all other women seem by comparison with
her monotonous and wearying. Intimacy with her
had a subtle flavor to it, by which other flavors
were dulled. The very impersonality of her enthusiasms
and interests, her capacity for looking on a person
for the time being merely as a representative or mouth-piece,
so to speak, of thoughts, of ideas, of narrations,
was one of her strongest charms. By reason of
this, the world was often unjust to her in its comments
on her manner, on her relations with men. The
world more than once accused her uncharitably of flirting.
But the men with whom she had friendships knew better;
and now and then a woman had the insight to be just
to her, to see that she was quite capable of regarding
a human being as objectively as she would a flower
or a mountain or a star. The blending of this
trait in her with the strong capacity she had for
loving individuals was singular; not more so, perhaps,
than the blending of the poetic temperament with the
active, energetic, and practical side of her nature.
It was not long before her name began
to be mentioned in connection with Parson Dorrance’s,
by the busy tongues which are always in motion in small
villages. It was not long, moreover, before a
thought and a hope, in which both these names were
allied, crept into the heart of Lizzy Hunter.
“Oh,” she thought, “if
only Uncle Dorrance would marry Mercy, how happy I
should be, she would be, every one would be.”
No suspicion of the relation in which
Mercy stood to Stephen White had ever crossed Mrs.
Hunter’s mind. She had never known Stephen
until recently; and his manner towards her had been
from the outset so chilled and constrained by his
unconscious jealousy of every new friend Mercy made,
that she had set him down in her own mind as a dull
and surly man, and rarely thought of him. And,
as one of poor Mercy’s many devices for keeping
up with her conscience a semblance of honesty in the
matter of Stephen was the entire omission of all reference
to him in her conversation, nothing occurred to remind
her friends of him. Parson Dorrance, indeed,
had said to her one day,-
“You never speak of Mr. White,
Mercy. Is he an agreeable and kind landlord?”
Mercy started, looked bewilderedly
in the Parson’s face, and repeated his words
mechanically,-
“Landlord?” Then recollecting
herself, she exclaimed, “Oh, yes! we do pay
rent to him; but it was paid for the whole year in
advance, and I had forgotten all about it.”
Parson Dorrance had had occasion to
distrust Stephen’s father, and he distrusted
the son. “Advance? advance?” he exclaimed.
“Why did you do that, child? That was all
wrong.”
“Oh, no!” said Mercy,
eagerly. “I had the money, and it made no
difference to me; and Mr. Allen told me that Mr. White
was in a great strait for money, so I was very glad
to give it to him. Such a mother is a terrible
burden on a young man,” and Mercy continued talking
about Mrs. White, until she had effectually led the
conversation away from Stephen.
When Lizzy Hunter first began to recognize
the possibility of her Uncle Dorrance’s loving
her dear friend Mercy, she found it very hard to refrain,
in her talks with Mercy, from all allusions to such
a possibility. But she knew instinctively that
any such suggestion would terrify Mercy, and make
her withdraw herself altogether. So she contented
herself with talking to her in what she thought were
safe generalizations on the subject of marriage.
Lizzy Hunter was one of the clinging, caressing, caressable
women, who nestle into men’s affections as kittens
nestle into warm corners, and from very much the same
motives,-love of warmth and shelter, and
of being fondled. To all these instincts in Lizzy,
however, were added a really beautiful motherliness
and great loyalty of affection. If the world
held more such women, there would be more happy children
and contented husbands.
“Mercy,” said she one
afternoon, earnestly, “Mercy, it makes me perfectly
wretched to have you say so confidently that you will
never be married. You don’t know what you
are talking about: you don’t realize in
the least what it is for a woman to live alone and
homeless to the end of her days.”
“I never need be homeless, dear,”
said Mercy. “I shall always have a home,
even after mother is no longer with me; and I am afraid
that is very near, she has failed so much this past
summer. But, even if I were all alone, I should
still keep my home.”
“A house isn’t a home,
Mercy!” exclaimed Lizzy. Of course you can
always be comfortable, so far as a roof and food go
towards comfort.”
“And that’s a great way,
my Lizzy,” interrupted Mercy, laughing,-“a
great way. No husband could possibly take the
place of them, could he?”
“Now, Mercy, don’t talk
so. You know very well what I mean,” replied
Lizzy. “It is so forlorn for a woman not
to have anybody need her, not to have anybody to love
her more than he loves all the rest of the world, and
not to have anybody to love herself. Oh, Mercy,
I don’t see how any woman lives without it!”
The tears came into Mercy’s
eyes. There were depths of lovingness in her
soul of which a woman like Lizzy could not even dream.
But she spoke in a resolute tone, and she spoke very
honestly, too, when she said,-
“Well, I don’t see how
any woman can help living very well without it, if
it doesn’t come to her. I don’t see
how any human being-man or woman, single
or married-can help being glad to be alive
under any conditions. It is such a glorious thing
to have a soul and a body, and to get the most out
of them. Just from the purely selfish point of
view, it seems to me a delight to live; and when you
look at it from a higher point, and think how much
each human being can do for those around him, why,
then it is sublime. Look at Parson Dorrance,
Lizzy! Just think of the sum of the happiness
that man has created in this world! He isn’t
lonely. He couldn’t think of such a thing.”
“Yes, he is, too,-I
know he is,” said Lizzy, impetuously. “The
very way he takes up my children and hugs them and
kisses them shows that he longs for a home and children
of his own.”
“I think not,” replied
Mercy. “It is all part of the perpetual
overflow of his benevolence. He can’t pass
by a living creature, if it is only a dog, without
a desire to give it a moment’s happiness.
Of happiness for himself he never thinks, because
he is on a plane above happiness,-a plane
of perpetual joy.” Mercy hesitated, paused,
and then went on, “I don’t mean to be
irreverent, but I could never think of his needing
personal ministrations to his own happiness, any more
than I could think of God’s needing them.
I think he is on a plane as absolutely above such needs
as God is. Not so high above, but as absolutely.”
“How are you so sure God is
above it?” said Lizzy, timidly. “I
can’t conceive of God’s being happy if
nobody loved him.”
Mercy was startled by these words
from Lizzy, who rarely questioned and never philosophized.
She opened her lips to reply with a hasty reiteration
of her first sentiment, but the words died even before
they were spoken, arrested by her sudden consciousness
of the possibility of a grand truth underlying Lizzy’s
instinct. If that were so, did it not lie out
far beyond every fact in life, include and control
them all, as the great truth of gravitation outlies
and embraces the physical universe? Did God so
need as well as so love the world, that he gave his
only begotten Son for it? Is this what it meant
to be “one with God”? Then, if the
great, illimitable heart of God thus yearns for the
love of his creatures, the greater the heart of a
human being, the more must he yearn for a fulness
of love, a completion of the cycle of bonds and joys
for which he was made. From these simple words
of a loving woman’s heart had flashed a great
light into Mercy’s comprehension of God.
She was silent for some moments; then she said solemnly,-
“That was a great thought you
had then, Lizzy. I never saw it in that light
before. I shall never forget it. Perhaps
you are right about the Parson, too. I wonder
if there is any thing he does long for? If there
is, I would die to give it to him,-I know
that.”
It was very near Lizzy’s lips
to say, “If you would live to give it to him,
it would be more to the purpose, perhaps;” but
she wisely forbore and they parted in silence, Mercy
absorbed in thinking of this new view of God’s
relation to man, and Lizzy hoping that Mercy was thinking
of Parson Dorrance’s need of a greater happiness
than he possessed.
As Mercy’s circle of friends
widened, and her interests enlarged and deepened,
her relation to Stephen became at once easier and harder:
easier, because she no longer spent so many hours alone
in perplexed meditation as to the possible wrong in
it; harder, because he was frequently unreasonable,
jealous of the pleasure that he saw she found in others,
jealous of the pleasure she gave to others,-jealous,
in short, of every thing in which he was not her centre.
Mercy was very patient with him. She loved him
unutterably. She never forgot for an instant the
quiet heroism with which he bore his hard life.
As the months had gone on, she had gradually established
a certain kindly familiarity with his mother; going
in often to see her, taking her little gifts of flowers
or fruit, and telling her of all little incidents
which might amuse her. She seemed to herself
in this way to be doing a little towards sharing Stephen’s
burden; and she also felt a certain bond to the woman
who, being Stephen’s mother, ought to have been
hers by adoption. The more she saw of Mrs. White’s
tyrannical, exacting nature, the more she yearned over
Stephen. Her first feeling of impatience with
him, of resentment at the seeming want of manliness
in such subjection, had long ago worn away. She
saw that there were but two courses for him,-either
to leave the house, or to buy a semblance of peace
at any cost.
“Flesh and blood can’t
stand up agin Mis’ White,” said Marty one
day, in an irrepressible confidence to Mercy.
“An’ the queerest thing is, that she’ll
never let go on you. There ain’t nothin’
to hender my goin’ away any day, an’
there hain’t been for twenty year; but she sez
I’m to stay till she dies, an’ I don’t
make no doubt I shall. It’s Mister Stephen
I stay for, though, after all, more ’n ’t
is her. I don’t believe the Lord ever made
such a man.”
Mercy’s cheeks would burn after
such a talk as this; and she would lavish upon Stephen
every device of love and cheer which she could invent,
to atone to him by hours, if possible, for the misery
of days.
But the hours were few and far between.
Stephen’s days were filled with work, and his
evenings were his mother’s. Only after she
slept did he have freedom. Just as soon as it
was safe for him to leave the house, he flew to Mercy;
but, oh, how meagre and pitiful did the few moments
seem!
“Hardly long enough to realize
that I am with you, my darling,” he often said.
“But then it is every day, Stephen,-think
of that,” Mercy would reply, bent always on
making all things easier instead of harder for him.
Even the concealment, which was at times well-nigh
insupportable to her, she never complained of now.
She had accepted it. “And, after accepting
it, I have no right to reproach him with it:
it would be base,” she thought.
Nevertheless, it was slowly wearing
away the very foundations of her peace. The morning
walks had long been given up. Mercy had been resolute
about this. When she found Stephen insisting upon
going in by-ways and lanes, lest some one should see
them who might mention it to his mother, when he told
her that she must not speak of it to her own mother,
she said firmly,-
“This must end, Stephen.
How hard it is to me to give it up you know very well.
It is like the sunrise to my day, always, these moments
with you. But I will not multiply concealments.
It makes me guilty and ashamed all the time.
Don’t urge me to any such thing; for I am not
sure that too much of it would not kill my love for
you. Let us be patient. Chance will do a
good deal for us; but I will not plan to meet clandestinely.
Whenever you can come to our house, that is different.
It distresses me to have you do that and never tell
of it; but that is yours and not mine, if any thing
can be yours and not mine,” she added sadly.
Stephen had not heard the last words.
“Kill your love for me, Mercy!”
he exclaimed. “Are you really afraid of
that?”
“No, not kill my love for you,”
replied Mercy, “I think nothing could do that,
but kill all my joy in my love for you; and that would
be as terrible to you as if the love were killed.
You would not know the difference, and I should not
be able to make you see it.”
It was a strange thing that with all
Stephen’s jealousy of Mercy’s enlarged
and enlarging life, of her ever-widening circle of
friends, he had no especial jealousy of Parson Dorrance.
The Parson was Mercy’s only frequent visitor;
and Stephen knew very well that he had become her
teacher and her guide, that she referred every question
to his decision, and was guided implicitly by his
taste and wish in her writing and in her studies.
But, when Stephen was a boy in college, Parson Dorranee
had seemed to him an old man; and he now seemed venerable.
Stephen could not have been freer from a lover’s
jealousy of him, if he had been Mercy’s own
father. Perhaps, if his instinct had been truer,
it might have quickened Mercy’s. She was
equally unaware of the real nature of the Parson’s
regard for her. He did for her the same things
he did for Lizzy, whom he called his child. He
came to see her no oftener, spoke to her no more affectionately:
she believed that she and Lizzy were sisters together
in his fatherly heart.
When she was undeceived, the shock
was very great: it was twofold,-a
shock to her sense of loyalty to Stephen, a shock to
her tender love for Parson Dorrance. It was true,
as she had said to Lizzy, that she would have died
to give him a pleasure; and yet she was forced to inflict
on him the hardest of all pains. Every circumstance
attending it made it harder; made it seem to Mercy
always in after life, as she looked back upon it,
needlessly hard,-cruelly, malignantly hard.
It was in the early autumn. The
bright colors which had thrilled Mercy with such surprise
and pleasure on her first arrival in Penfield were
glowing again on the trees, it seemed to her brighter
than before. Purple asters and golden-rod waved
on the roadsides and in the fields; and blue gentians,
for which Penfield was famous, were blooming everywhere.
Parson Dorrance came one day to take Lizzy and Mercy
over to his “Parish,” as he called “The
Cedars.” They had often been with him there;
and Mercy had been for a long time secretly hoping
that he would ask her to help him in teaching the
negroes. The day was one of those radiant and
crystalline days peculiar to the New England autumn.
On such days, joy becomes inevitable even to inert
and lifeless natures: to enthusiastic and spontaneous
ones, the exhilaration of the air and the sun is as
intoxicating as wine. Mercy was in one of her
most mirthful moods. She frolicked with the negro
children, and decked their little woolly heads with
wreaths of golden-rod, till they looked as fantastic
as dancing monkeys. She gathered great sheaves
of ferns and blue gentians and asters, until the Parson
implored her to “leave a few just for the poor
sun to shine on.” The paths winding among
“The Cedars” were in some places thick-set
with white eupatoriums, which were now in full, feathery
flower, some of them so old that, as you brushed past
them, a cloud of the fine thread-like petals flew
in all directions. Mercy gathered branch after
branch of these, but threw them away impatiently, as
the flowers fell off, leaving the stems bare.
“Oh, dear!” she exclaimed.
“Nature wants some seeds, I suppose; but I want
flowers. What becomes of the poor flower, any
way? it lives such a short while; all its beauty and
grace sacrificed to the making of a seed for next
year.”
“That’s the way with every
thing in life, dear child,” said Parson Dorrance.
“The thing that shall be is the thing for which
all the powers of nature are at work. We, you
and Lizzy and I, will drop off our stems presently,-I,
a good deal the first, for you and Lizzy have the blessing
of youth, but I am old.”
“You are not old! You are
the youngest person I know,” exclaimed Mercy,
impetuously. “You will never be old, Mr.
Dorrance, not if you should live to be as old as-as
old as the Wandering Jew!”
Mercy’s eyes were fixed intently
on the Parson’s face; but she did not note the
deep flush which rose to his very hair, as she said
these words. She was thinking only of the glorious
soul, and seeing only its shining through the outer
tabernacle. Lizzy Hunter, however, saw the flush,
and knew what it meant, and her heart gave a leap
of joy. “Now he can see that Mercy never
thinks of him as an old man, and never would,”
she thought to herself; and while her hands were idly
playing with her flowers and mosses, and her face
looked as innocent and care-free as a baby’s,
her brain was weaving plots of the most complicated
devices for hastening on the future which began to
look to her so assured for these two.
They were sitting on a mossy mound
in the shadow of great cedar-trees. The fields
around “The Cedars” were filled with low
mounds, like velvet cushions: some of them were
merely a mat of moss over great rocks; some of them
were soft yielding masses of moss, low cornel, blueberry-bushes,
wintergreen, blackberry-vines, and sweet ferns; dainty,
fragrant, crowded ovals, lovelier than any florist
could ever make; white and green in the spring, when
the cornels were in flower; scarlet and green and blue
in the autumn, when the cornels and the blueberries
were in fruit.
Mercy was sitting on a mound which
was thick-grown with the shining wintergreen.
She picked a stem which had a cluster of red berries
on it, and below the berries one tiny pink blossom.
As she held it up, the blossom fell, leaving a tiny
satin disk behind it on its stem. She took the
bell and tried to fit it again on its place; then she
turned it over and over, held it up to the light and
looked through it. “It makes me sad,”
she said: “I wish I knew if the flower knows
any thing about the fruit. If it were working
to that end all the while, and so were content to
pass on and make room, it would seem all right.
But I don’t want to pass on and make room!
I do so like to be here!”
Parson Dorrance looked from one woman’s
face to the other, both young, both lovely: Lizzy’s
so full of placid content, unquestioning affection,
and acceptance; Mercy’s so full of mysterious
earnestness, far-seeing vision, and interpretation.
“What a lot lies before that
gifted creature,” he said to himself, “if
life should go wrong with her! If only I might
dare to take her fate into my hands! I do not
believe any one else can do for her what I could, if
I were only younger.” And the Parson sighed.
That night he stayed in Penfield at
Lizzy’s house. The next morning, on his
way to Danby, he stopped to see Mercy for a moment.
When he entered her door, he had no knowledge of what
lay before him; he had not yet said to himself, had
not yet dared to say to himself, that he would ask
Mercy to be his wife. He knew that the thought
of it was more and more present with him, grew sweeter
and sweeter; yet he had never ceased resisting it,
saying that it was impossible. That is, he had
never ceased saying so in words; but his heart had
ceased resisting long ago. Only that traitor
which we call judgment had been keeping up a false
show of resolute opinion, just to lure the beguiled
heart farther and farther on in a mistaken security.
But love is like the plants.
It has its appointed days for flowers and for the
falling of the flowers. The vague, sweetness of
the early hours and days together, the bright happiness
of the first close intimacy and interchange,-these
reach their destined moment, to pass on and make room
for the harvest. Blessed are the lives in which
all these sweet early petals float off gently and
in season for the perfect setting of the holy fruit!
On this morning, when Parson Dorrance
entered Mercy’s room, it was already decorated
as if for a festival. Every blooming thing she
had brought from “The Cedars” the day
before had taken its own place in the room, and looked
as at home as it had looked in the fields. One
of Mercy’s great gifts was the gift of creating
in rooms a certain look which it is hard to define.
The phrase “vitalized individuality,” perhaps,
would come as near describing it as is possible; for
it was not merely that the rooms looked unlike other
rooms. Every article in them seemed to stand in
the place where it must needs stand by virtue of its
use and its quality. Every thing had a certain
sort of dramatic fitness, without in the least trenching
on the theatrical. Her effects were always produced
with simple things, in simple ways; but they resulted
in an impression of abundance and luxury. As
Parson Dorrance glanced around at all the wild-wood
beauty, and the wild-wood fragrance stole upon his
senses, a great mastering wave of love for the woman
whose hand had planned it all swept over him.
He recalled Mercy’s face the day before, when
she had said,-
“You are the youngest person
I know;” and, as she crossed the threshold of
the door at that instant, he went swiftly towards her
with outstretched hands, and a look on his face which,
if she had seen, she could not have failed to interpret
aright.
But she was used to the outstretched
hands; she always put both her own in them, as simply
as a child; and she was bringing to her teacher now
a little poem, of which her thoughts were full.
She did not look fully in his face, therefore; for
it was still a hard thing for her to show him her
verses.
Holding out the paper, she said shyly,-
“It had to get itself said or
sung, you know,-that thought that haunted
me so yesterday at ‘The Cedars.’ I
daresay it is very bad poetry, though.”
Parson Dorrance unfolded the paper,
and read the following poem:-
Where?
My snowy eupatorium has dropped
Its silver threads of petals in the night;
No sound told me its blossoming had stopped;
Its seed-films flutter, silent, ghostly
white:
No answer stirs the shining
air,
As I ask, “Where?”
Beneath the glossy leaves of wintergreen
Dead lily-bells lie low, and in their
place
A rounded disk of pearly pink is seen,
Which tells not of the lily’s fragrant
grace:
No answer stirs the shining
air,
As I ask “Where?”
This morning’s sunrise does not
show to me
Seed-film or fruit of my sweet yesterday;
Like falling flowers, to realms I cannot
see
Its moments floated silently away:
No answer stirs the shining
air,
As I ask, “Where?”
As he read the last verse, his face
altered. Mercy was watching him.
“I thought you wouldn’t
like the last verse,” she said eagerly.
“But, indeed, it doesn’t mean doubt.
I know very well no day dies; but we can’t see
the especial good of each single day by itself.
That is all I meant.”
Parson Dorrance came closer to Mercy:
they were both standing. He laid one hand on
her’ head, and said,-
“Child, it was a ‘sweet yesterday’
wasn’t it?”
“Oh, yes,” said Mercy,
still absorbed in the thought of the poem. “The
day was as sweet as the flowers. But all days
are heavenly sweet out of doors with you and Lizzy,”
she continued, lifting one hand, and laying it caressingly
on the hand which was stroking her hair.
“O Mercy! Mercy! couldn’t
I make all days sweet for you? Come to me, darling,
and let me try!” came from Parson Dorrance’s
lips in hurried and husky tones.
Mercy looked at him for one second
in undisguised terror and bewilderment. Then
she uttered a sharp cry, as of one who had suddenly
got a wound, and, burying her face in her hands, sank
into a chair and began to cry convulsively.
Parson Dorrance walked up and down
the room. He dared not speak. He was not
quite sure what Mercy’s weeping meant; so hard
is it, for a single moment, to wrench a great hope
out of a man’s heart. But, as she continued
sobbing, he understood. Unselfish to the core,
his first thought was, even now, “Alas! now
she will never let me do any thing more for her.
Oh, how shall I win her back to trust me as a father
again?”
“Mercy!” he said. Mercy did not answer
nor look up.
“Mercy!” he repeated in a firmer tone.
“Mercy, my child, look up at me!”
Docile from her long habit and from
her great love, Mercy looked up, with the tears streaming.
As soon as she saw Parson Dorrance’s face, she
burst again into more violent crying, and sobbed out
incoherently,-
“Oh! I never knew it. It wouldn’t
be right.”
“Hush, dear! Hush!”
said the Parson, in a voice of tender authority.
“I have done wrong; and you must forgive me,
and forget it. You are not in the least to blame.
It is I who ought to have known that you could never
think of me as any thing but a father.”
“Oh! it is not that,”
sobbed Mercy, vehemently,-“it is not
that at all! But it wouldn’t be right.”
Parson Dorrance would not have been
human if Mercy’s vehement “It is not that,-it
is not that!” had not fallen on his ear gratefully,
and made hope stir in his heart again. But her
evident grief was too great for the hope to last a
moment.
“You may not know why it seems
so wrong to you, dear child,” he continued;
“but that is the real reason. There could
be no other.” He paused. Mercy shuddered,
and opened her lips to speak again; but the words refused
to be uttered. This was the supreme moment of
pain. If she could but have said,-
“I loved some one else long
before I saw you. I was not my own. If it
had not been for that, I should have loved you, I
know I should!” Even in her tumult of suffering,
she was distinctly conscious of all this. The
words “I could have loved him, I know I could!
I can’t bear to have him think it is because
he is so old,” went clamoring in her heart, pleading
to be said; but she dared not say them.
Tenderly and patiently Parson Dorrance
endeavored to soothe her, to convince her that his
words sprung from a hasty impulse which he would be
able wholly to put aside and forget. The one thing
that he longed now to do, the only reparation that
he felt was left for him to make to her, was to enable
her, if possible, to look on him as she had done before.
But Mercy herself made this more difficult. Suddenly
wiping her tears, she looked very steadily into his
face, and said slowly,-“It is not
of the least use, Mr. Dorrance, for you to say this
sort of thing to me. You can’t deceive
me. I know exactly how you love me, and how you
always will love me. And, oh, I wish I were dead!
It can never be any thing but pain to you to see me,-never,”
and she wept more bitterly than before.
“You do not know me, Mercy,”
replied the Parson, speaking as slowly as she had
done. “All my life has been one long sacrifice
of my own chief preferences. It is not hard for
me to do it.”
Mercy clasped her hands tighter, and groaned,-
“Oh, I know it! I know
it! and I said you were on a plane above all thought
of personal happiness.”
The Parson looked bewildered, but went on,-
“You do love me, my child, very dearly, do you
not?”
“Oh, you know I do!” cried Mercy.
“You know I do!”
“Yes, I know you do, or I should
not have said that. You know I am all alone in
the world, do you not?”
“Yes,” moaned Mercy.
“Very well. Now remember
that you and Lizzy are my two children, and that the
greatest happiness I can have, the greatest help in
my loneliness, is the love of my two daughters.
You will not refuse me this help, will you? You
will let me be just as I was before, will you not?”
Mercy did not answer.
“Will you try, Mercy?”
he said in a tone almost of the old affectionate authority;
and Mercy again moaned rather than said,-
“Yes.”
Then Parson Dorrance kissed her hair
where his hand had lain a few moments before, and
said,-
“Now I must go. Good-by, my child.”
But Mercy did not look up; and he
closed the door gently, leaving her sitting there
bowed and heart-stricken, in the little room so gay
with the bright flowers she had gathered on her “sweet
yesterday.”