All these new interests and occupations, while they did not in the least weaken her loyalty to Stephen, filled her thoughts healthfully and absorbingly, and left her no room for any such passionate longing and brooding as Stephen poured out to her in his letters.  He looked in vain for any response to these expressions.  Sometimes, unable to bear the omission any longer, he would ask her pathetically why she did not say that she longed to see him.  Her reply was characteristic:—­

“You ask me, dear, why I do not say that I long to see you.  I am not sure that I ever do long, in the sense in which you use the word.  I know that I cannot see you till next winter, just as I used to know every morning that I could not see you until night; and the months between now and then seem to me one solid interval of time to be filled up and made the most of, just as the interval of the daytime between your going away in the morning and coming home at night used to seem to me.  I do not think, dear Stephen, there is a moment of any day when I have not an under current of consciousness of you; but it is not a longing for the sight of you.  Are you sure, darling, that the love which takes perpetual shape in such longings is the strongest love?”

Little by little, phrases like this sank into Stephen’s mind, and gradually crystallized into a firm conviction that Mercy was being weaned from him.  It was not so.  It was only that separation and its surer tests were adjusting to a truer level the relation between them.  She did not love him one whit less; but she was taking the position which belonged to her stronger and finer organization.  If she had ever lived by his side as his wife, the same change would have come; but her never-failing tenderness would have effectually covered it from his recognition, and hid it from her own, so long as he looked into her eyes with pleading love, and she answered with woman’s fondness.  No realization of inequality could ever have come.  It is, after all, the flesh and blood of the loved one which we idealize.  There is in love’s sacraments a “real presence,” which handling cannot make us doubt.  It is when we go apart and reflect that our reason asks questions.  Mercy did not in the least know that she was outgrowing Stephen White.  She did not in the least suspect that her affection and her loyalty were centring around an ideal personality, to which she gave his name, but which had in reality never existed.  She believed honestly that she was living for and in Stephen all this time; that she was his, as he was hers, inalienably and for ever.  If it had been suggested to her that it was unnatural that she should be so content in a daily life which he did not share, so busy and glad in occupations and plans and aspirations into which he did not enter, she would have been astonished.  She would have said, “How foolish of me to do otherwise!  We have our lives to lead, our work to do.  It would be a sin to waste one’s