Stephen was deeply wounded.  Mercy’s attempted reticence in her letter had not blinded him.  He felt what had underlain the words, and it was a hard blow to him.  His conscience was as free from any shadow of guilt in the matter of that money as if it had been his by direct inheritance from his own father.  Feeling this, he had naturally the keenest sense of outrage at Mercy’s implied accusation.

Before Stephen’s second letter came, Mercy had grown calm.  The more she thought the thing over, the more she felt sure that Mrs. Jacobs must be dead, and that Stephen in his great excitement had forgotten to mention the fact.  Therefore the second letter was even a greater blow to her than the first:  it was a second and a deeper thrust into a wound which had hardly begun to heal.  There was also a tone of confident, almost arrogant, assumption in the letter, it seemed to Mercy, which irritated her.  She did not perceive that it was the inevitable confidence of a person so sure he is right that he cannot comprehend any doubt in another’s mind on the subject.  There was in Mercy’s nature a vein of intolerance, which was capable of the most terrible severity.  She was as blinded, to Stephen’s true position in the matter as he was to hers.  The final moment of divergence had come:  its seeds were planted in her nature and in Stephen’s when they were born.  Nothing could have hindered their growth, nothing could have forestalled their ultimate result.  It was only a question of time and of occasion, when the two forces would be arrayed against each other, and would be found equally strong.

Mercy took counsel with herself now, and delayed answering this second letter.  She was resolved to be just to Stephen.

“I will think this thing over and over,” she said to herself, “till I am sure past all doubt that I am right, before I say another word.”

But her long thinking did not help Stephen.  Each day her conviction grew deeper, her perception clearer, her sense of alienation from Stephen profounder.  If a moral antagonism had grown up between them in any other shape, it would have been less fatal to her love.  There were many species of wrong-doing which would have been less hateful in her sight.  It seemed to her sometimes that there could be no crime in the world which would appear to her so odious as this.  Her imagination dwelt on the picture of the lonely old woman in the alms-house.  She had been several times to see Mrs. Jacobs, and had been much moved by a certain grim stoicism which gave almost dignity to her squalor and wretchedness.

“She always had the bearing of a person who knew she was suffering wrongly, but was too proud to complain,” thought Mercy.  “I wonder if she did not all along believe there was something wrong about the mortgage?” and Mercy’s suspicious thoughts and conjectures ran far back into the past, fastening on the beginnings of all this trouble.  She recollected old Mr. Wheeler’s warnings about Stephen, in the first weeks of her stay in Penfield.  She recollected Parson Dorrance’s expression, when he found out that she had paid her rent in advance.  She tortured herself by reviewing minutely every little manoeuvre she had known of Stephen’s practising to conceal his relation with her.