“You do give me great, unutterable happiness, Mercy,” he replied.  “I never think of the pain:  I only think of the joy,” and he laid her hand on his lips.  “All the pain that you could possibly give me in a lifetime could not outweigh the joy of one such moment as this, when you say that you love me.”

These days were unspeakably hard for Stephen.  He had grown during the past year to so live on the sight and in the blessedness of Mercy that to be shut away from them was simply a sort of dying.  There was no going back for him to the calm routine of the old life before she came.  He was restless and wretched:  he walked up and down in front of the house every night, watching the shadow of her figure on the curtains of her mother’s room.  He made all manner of excuses, true and false, reasonable and unreasonable, to speak to her for a moment at the door in the morning.  He carried the few verses in his pocket-book she had given him; and, although he knew them nearly by heart, he spent long hours in his office turning the little papers over and over.  Some of them were so joyous that they stirred in him almost a bitter incredulity as he read them in these days of loss and pain.  One was a sonnet which she had written during a two days’ absence of his,—­his only absence from his mother’s house for six years.  Mercy had been astonished at her sense of loneliness in these two days.  “O Stephen,” she had said, when he came back, “I am honestly ashamed of having missed you so much.  Just the knowing that you wouldn’t be here to come in, in the evenings, made the days seem a thousand years long, and this is what came of it.”

And she gave him this sonnet:—­

  To an absent lover.

  That so much change should come when them dost go,
  Is mystery that I cannot ravel quite. 
  The very house seems dark as when the light
  Of lamps goes out.  Each wonted thing doth grow
  So altered, that I wander to and fro,
  Bewildered by the most familiar sight,
  And feel like one who rouses in the night
  From dream of ecstasy, and cannot know
  At first if he be sleeping or awake,
  My foolish heart so foolish for thy sake
  Hath grown, dear one! 
      Teach me to be more wise. 
  I blush for all my foolishness doth lack;
  I fear to seem a coward in thine eyes. 
  Teach me, dear one,—­but first thou must come back!

Another was a little poem, which she laughingly called his and not hers.  One morning, when they had bade each other “good-by,” and she had kissed him,—­a rare thing for Mercy to do, he had exclaimed, “That kiss will go floating before me all day in the air, Mercy.  I shall see every thing in a light as rosy as your lips.”

At night she gave him this little poem, saying,—­

“This is your poem, not mine, darling.  I should never have thought of any thing so absurd myself.”

  “Couleur de rose.”