“Where will you go, Mercy?” asked Stephen, in a tone of dull, hopeless misery.

“I do not know.  I have not thought yet.  Back to my old home for a visit, I think, and then to some city to study and work.  That is the best life for me.”

“O Mercy, Mercy, I am going to lose you,—­lose you utterly!” exclaimed Stephen.

Mercy looked at him with a pained and perplexed expression.  “Stephen,” she said earnestly, “I can’t understand you.  You bear your hard life so uncomplainingly, so bravely, that it seems as if you could not have a vestige of selfishness in you; and yet”—­Mercy halted; she could not put her thought in words.  Stephen finished it for her.

“And yet,” he said, “I am selfish about you, you think.  Selfish!  Good God! do you call it selfishness in a man who is drowning, to try to swim, in a man who is starving, to clutch a morsel of bread?  What else have I that one could call life except you?  Tell me, Mercy!  You are my life:  that is the whole of it.  All that a man has he will give for his life.  Is it selfishness?” Stephen locked his hands tight together, and looked at Mercy almost angrily.  She was writhing under his words.  She had always an unspeakable dread of being unjust to him.  Love made her infinitely tender, and pity made her yearn over him.  But neither her own love and pity nor his passionate words could wholly blind her now; and there was a sadness in the tones in which she replied,—­

“No, Stephen, I did not mean to call you selfish; but I can’t understand why you are not as brave and patient about all hard things as you are about the one hardest thing of all.”

“Mercy, would you marry me now, if I asked you?” said Stephen.  He did not realize the equivocal form of his question.  An indignant look swept over Mercy’s face for a moment, but only for a moment.  She knew Stephen’s love too well.

“No, Stephen,” she said, “I would not.  If you had asked me at first, I should have done it.  I thought then that it would be best,” she said, with hot blushes mounting high on her cheeks; “but I have seen since that it would not.”

Stephen sighed.  “I am glad you see that,” he said.  Then in a lower tone, “You know you are free, Mercy,—­utterly free.  I would never be so base as to hold you by a word.”

Mercy smiled half-bitterly, as she replied,—­

“Words never hold people, and you know very well it is only an empty form of words to say that I am free.  I do not want to be free, darling,” she added, in a burst of tenderness toward him.  “You could not set me free, if you tried.”

When Mercy told Parson Dorrance her intention of going away, his face changed as if some fierce spasm wrung him; but it was over in a second, and he said,—­

“You are quite right, my child,—­quite right.  It will be a great deal better for you in every way.  This is no place for you now.  You must have at least a year or two of travel and entire change.”