At this point, Mercy dropped the letter,—­dropped it as if it had been a viper that stung her.  She was conscious of but two things:  a strange, creeping cold which seemed to be chilling her to the very marrow of her bones; and a vague but terrible sense of horror, mentally.  The letter fell to the floor.  She did not observe it.  A half-hour passed, and she did not know that it had been a moment.  Gradually, her brain began to rouse into activity again, and strove confusedly with the thoughts which crowded on it.

“That would be stealing.  He can’t mean it.  Stephen can’t be a thief.”  Half-formed, incoherent sentences like these floated in her mind, seemed to be floating in the air, pronounced by hissing voices.

She pressed her hands to her temples, and sprang to her feet.  The letter rustled on the floor, as her gown swept over it.  She turned and looked at it, as if it were a living thing she would kill.  She stooped to pick it up, and then recoiled from it.  She shrank from the very paper.  All the vehemence of her nature was roused.  As in the moment of drowning people are said to review in one swift flash of consciousness their whole lives, so now in this moment did Mercy look back over the months of her life with Stephen.  Her sense of the baseness of his action now was like a lightning illuming every corner of the past:  every equivocation, every concealment, every subterfuge he had practised, stood out before her, bare, stripped of every shred of apology or excuse.  “He lies; he has always lied.  Why should he not steal?” she exclaimed.  “It is only another form of the same thing.  He stole me, too; and he made me steal him.  He is dishonest to the very core.  How did I ever love such a man?  What blinded me to his real nature?”

Then a great revulsion of feeling, of tenderness toward Stephen, would sweep over her, and drown all these thoughts.  “O my poor, brave, patient darling!  He never meant to do any thing wrong in his life.  He does not see things as I do:  no human soul could see clearly, standing where he stands.  There is a moral warp in his nature, for which he is no more responsible than a tree is responsible for having grown into a crooked shape when it was broken down by heavy stones while it was a sapling.  Oh, how unjust I am to him!  I will never think such thoughts of him again.  My darling, my darling!  He did not stop to think in his excitement that the money was not his.  I daresay he has already seen it differently.”

Like waves breaking on a beach, and rolling back again to meet higher waves and be swallowed up in them, these opposing thoughts and emotions struggled with each other in Mercy’s bosom.  Her heart and her judgment were at variance, and the antagonism was irreconcilable.  She could not believe that her lover was dishonest.  She could not but call his act a theft.  The night came and went, and no lull had come to the storm by which her soul was tossed.  She could not sleep.  As the morning