What a reprieve in that!  He had yet to learn that love can be crueller than any friendship, than any indifference, than any hate:  nothing is so exacting, so inexorable, as love.  The letter was full of love; but it was, nevertheless, hard and pitiless in its tone.  Stephen read it again and again:  then he held it in the flame of the lamp, and let it slowly burn, until only a few scorched fragments remained.  These he folded in a small paper, and put into his pocket-book.  Why he did this, he could not tell, and wondered at himself for doing it.  Then he walked the room for an hour or two, revolving in his mind what he should say to Mercy.  His ideas arranged themselves concisely and clearly.  He had been stung by Mercy’s letter into a frame of feeling hardly less inexorable than her own.  He said to himself, “She never truly loved me, or nothing under heaven could make her believe me capable of a dishonesty;” and, in midst of all his pain at this thought, he had an indignant resentment, as if Mercy herself had been in some way actively responsible for all this misery.

His letter was shorter than Mercy’s.  They were sad, strange letters to have passed between lovers.  Mercy’s ran as follows:—­

“My darling Stephen,—­Your letters have shocked me so deeply that I find myself at a loss for words in which to reply.  I cannot understand your present position at all.  I have waited all these days, hoping that some new light would come to me, that I could see the whole thing differently; but I cannot.  On the contrary, each hour that I think of it (and I have thought of nothing else since your second letter came) only makes my conviction stronger.  Darling, that money is Mrs. Jacobs’s money, by every moral right.  You may be correct in your statement as to the legal rights of the case.  I take it for granted that you are.  At any rate, I know nothing about that; and I rest no argument upon it at all.  But it is clear as daylight to me that morally you are bound to give her the money.  Suppose you had had permission from her to make those changes in the house, while you were still her tenant, and had found the money, then you would have handed it to her unhesitatingly.  Why?  Because you would have said, ’This woman’s husband built this house.  No one except his brother who could possibly have deposited this money here has lived in the house.  One of those two men was the owner of that gold.  In either case, she is the only heir, and it is hers.  I am sure you would have felt this, had we chanced to discover the money on one of those winter nights you refer to.  Now in what has the moral obligation been changed by the fact that the house has come into your hands?  Not by ordinary sale, either; but simply by foreclosure of a mortgage, under conditions which were certainly very hard for Mrs. Jacobs, inasmuch as one-half the interest has always been paid.  This money which you have found would have paid nearly the whole of the original loan.  It was hers,