but, oh, my darling, I should always have felt as if I helped steal the money, if I kept quiet about it.  You see I use a past tense already, I feel so certain that you will give it up now.  Dear, dear Stephen, you will never be sorry:  as soon as it is done, you will be glad.  I wish that gold had been all sunk in the sea, and never seen light again, the sight of it has cost us so dear.  Darling, I can’t tell you what a load has rolled off my heart.  Oh, if you could know what it has been to me to have this cloud over my thoughts of you!  I have always been so proud of you, Stephen,—­your patience, your bravery.  In my thought, you have stood always for my ideal of the beautiful alliance of gentleness and strength.  Darling, we owe something to those who love us:  we owe it to them not to disappoint them.  If I were to be tempted to do some dishonorable thing, I should say to myself:  ’No, for I must be what Stephen believes me.  It is not only that I will not grieve him:  still more, I will not disappoint him.’”

Mercy wrote on and on.  The reaction from the pent-up grief, the prolonged strain, was great.  In her first joy at any, even the least, alleviation of the horror she had felt at the thought of Stephen’s dishonesty, she over-estimated the extent of the relief she would feel from his surrendering the money at her request.  She wrote as buoyantly, as confidently, as if his doing that would do away with the whole wrong from the beginning.  In her overflowing, impetuosity, also, she did not consider what severe and cutting things were implied as well as said in some of her sentences.  She closed the letter without rereading it, hastened to send it by the first mail, and then began to count the days which must pass before Stephen’s answer could reach her.

Alas for Mercy! this was a sad preparation for the result which was to follow her hastily written words.  It seems sometimes as if fate delighted in lifting us up only to cast us down, in taking us up into a high mountain to show us bright and goodly lands, only to make our speedy imprisonment in the dark valley the harder to bear.

Stephen read this last letter of Mercy’s with an ever-increasing sense of resentment to the very end.  For the time being it seemed to actually obliterate every trace of his love for her.  He read the words as wrathfully as if they had been written by a mere acquaintance.

“Good heavens!” he exclaimed. “‘Stolen money!  Inform the authorities!’ Let her do it if she likes and see how she would come out at the end of that.’  And Stephen wrote Mercy very much such a letter as he would have written to a man under the same circumstances.  Luckily, he kept it a day, and, rereading it in a cooler moment was shocked at its tone, destroyed it, and wrote another.  But the second one was no less hard, only more courteous, than the first.  It ran thus:—­