But all Stephen’s patience, gentleness, and firmness did not abate one jot or tittle of Mercy’s conviction that he was doing a dishonest thing.  Oh the contrary, his quiet appeared to her more and more like a callous satisfaction; and his occasional cheerfulness, like an exultation over his ill-gotten gains.  Slowly there crept into her feeling towards him a certain something which was akin to scorn,—­the most fatal of deaths to love.  The hateful word “thief” seemed to be perpetually ringing in her ears.  When she read accounts of robberies, of defalcations, of breaches of trust, she found herself always drawing parallels between the conduct of these criminals and Stephen’s.  The secrecy, the unassailable safety of his crime, seemed to her to make it inexpressibly more odious.

“I do believe,” she thought to herself again and again, “that if he had been driven by his poverty to knocking men down on the highway, and robbing them of their pocket-books, I should not have so loathed it!”

As the weeks went on, Mercy’s unhappiness increased rather than diminished.  There seemed an irreconcilible conflict between her love and every other emotion in her soul.  She seemed to herself to be, as it were, playing the hypocrite to her own heart in thinking thus of a man and loving him still; for that she still loved Stephen, she did not once doubt.  At this time, she printed a little poem, which set many of her friends to vondering from what experience of hers it could possibly have been drawn.  Mercy’s poems were so largely subjective in tone that it was hard for her readers to believe that they were not all drawn from her own individual experience.

  A woman’s battle.

    Dear foe, I know thou’lt win the fight;
    I know thou hast the stronger bark,
    And thou art sailing in the light,
    While I am creeping in the dark. 
  Thou dost not dream that I am crying,
  As I come up with colors flying.

    I clear away my wounded, slain,
    With strength like frenzy strong and swift;
    I do not feel the tug and strain,
    Though dead are heavy, hard to lift. 
  If I looked on their faces dying,
  I could not keep my colors flying.

    Dear foe, it will be short,—­our fight,—­
    Though lazily thou train’st thy guns: 
    Fate steers us,—­me to deeper night,
    And thee to brighter seas and suns;
  But thou’lt not dream that I am dying,
  As I sail by with colors flying!

There was great injustice to Stephen in this poem.  When he read it, he groaned, and exclaimed aloud, “O Mercy!  O Mercy!” Then, as he read it over again, he said, “Surely she could not have meant herself in this:  it is only dramatic.  She could never call me her foe.”  Mercy had often said to him of some of her most intense poems, “Oh, it was purely dramatic.  I just fancied how anybody would feel under such circumstances;” and he clung to the hope that it was true in this