“I shall move out of the house at once, into the little cottage you liked so much, farther up on the hill.  That is for rent, only fifty dollars a year.  I shall put this house into good repair, run a piazza around it as you suggested, and paint it; and then I think I shall be sure of finding a purchaser.  It can be made a very pretty house by expending a little money on it; and I can sell it for enough more to repay me.  I am sure nobody would buy it as it is.”

Mercy replied very briefly to this part of Stephen’s letter.  She had discussed the question with him often before, and she knew the strict justice of his claim; but her heart ached for the poor friendless old woman, who was thus to lose her last dollar.  If it had been possible for Mercy to have continued to pay the rent of the wing herself, she would gladly have done so; but, at her suggestion of such a thing, Stephen had been so angry that she had been almost frightened.

“I am not so poor yet, Mercy,” he had exclaimed, “as to take charity from you!  I think I should go to the alms-house myself first.  I don’t see why old Granny Jacobs is so much to you, any way.”

“Only because she is so absolutely friendless, Stephen,” Mercy had replied gently.  “I never before knew of anybody who had not a relative or a friend in the world; and I am afraid they are cruel to the poor people at the alms-house.  They all look so starved and wretched!”

“Well, it will be no more than she deserves,” said Stephen; “for she was cruel to her husband’s brother’s wife.  I used to hear horrid stories, when I was a boy, about how she drove them out of the house; and she was cruel to her son too, and drove him away from home.  Of course, I am sorry to be the instrument of punishing her, and I do have a certain pity for the old woman; but it is really her own fault.  She might be living now in comfort with her son, perhaps, if she had treated him well.”

“We can’t go by such ‘ifs’ in this world, Steve,” said Mercy, earnestly.  “We have to take things as they are.  I don’t want to be judged way back in my life.  Only God knows all the ‘ifs.’” Such conversations as these had prepared Mercy for the news which Stephen now wrote her; but they had in no wise changed her feeling in regard to it.  She believed in the bottom of her heart that Stephen might have secured a tenant, if he had tried.  He had once, in speaking of the matter, dropped a sentence which had shocked her so that she could never forget it.

“It would be a great deal better for me,” he had said, “to have the money invested in some other way.  If the house does fall into my hands, I shall sell it; and, even if I don’t get the full amount of what father loaned, I shall make it bring us in a good deal more than it does this way.”

This sentence rang in Mercy’s ears, as she read in Stephen’s letter all his plans for improving the house; but the thing was done, and it was not Mercy’s habit to waste effort or speech over things which could not be altered.