dawned, she rose with haggard and weary eyes, and prepared to write to Stephen.  In some of her calmer intervals, she had read the remainder of his letter.  It was chiefly filled with the details of the manner in which the gold had been hidden.  A second fireplace had been built inside the first, leaving a space of several inches between the two brick walls.  On each side two bricks had been so left that they could be easily taken out and replaced; and the bags of gold hung upon iron stanchions in the outer wall.  What a strange picture it must have been in the silent night hours,—­the old miser bending above the embers of the dying fire on the hearth, and reaching down the crevice to his treasures!  The bags were of leather, curiously embossed; they were almost charred by the heat, and the gold was dull and brown.

“I wonder which old fellow put it there?” said Stephen, at the end of his letter.  “Captain John would have been more likely to have foreign gold; but why should he hide it in his brother’s fireplace?  At any rate, to whichever of them I am indebted for it, I am most profoundly grateful.  If ever I meet him in any world, I’ll thank him.”

Suddenly the thought occurred to Mercy, “Perhaps old Mrs. Jacobs is dead.  Then there would be nobody who had any right to the money.  But no:  Stephen would have told me if she had been.”

Still she clung to this straw of a hope; and, when she sat down to write to Stephen, these words came first to her pen:—­

“Is Mrs. Jacobs dead, Stephen?  You do not say any thing about her; but I cannot imagine your thinking for a moment of keeping that money for yourself, unless she is dead.  If she is alive, the money is hers.  Nobody but her husband or his brother could have put it there.  Nobody else has lived in the house, except very poor people.  Forgive me, dear, but perhaps you had not thought of this when you first wrote:  it has very likely occurred to you since then, and I may be making a very superfluous suggestion.”  So hard did she cling to the semblance of a trust that all would yet prove to be well with her love and her lover.

Stephen’s reply came by the very next mail.  It was short:  it ran thus:—­

“Dear darling,—­I do not know what to make of your letter.  Your sentence, ’I cannot imagine your thinking for a moment of keeping that money for yourself,’ is a most extraordinary one.  What do you mean by ’keeping it for myself’?  It is mine:  the house was mine and all that was in it.  Old Mrs. Jacobs is alive still, at least she was last week; but she has no more claim on that money than any other old woman in town.  I can’t suppose you would think me a thief, Mercy; but your letter strikes me as a very strange one.  Suppose I were to discover that there is a gold mine in the orchard,—­stranger things than that have happened,—­would you say that that also belonged to Mrs. Jacobs and not to me?  The cases are precisely parallel.  You have allowed your impulsive feeling to run away with your judgment; and, as I so often tell you, whenever you do that, you are wrong.  I never thought, however, it would carry you so far as to make you suspect me of a dishonorable act.”