“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.