It took many years for her to reach this plane, to attain to the fulness of this close spiritual communion with things seen and unseen.  The double bereavement and strain of her two years of life in Penfield left her for a long time bruised and sore.  Her relation with Stephen, as she looked back upon it, hurt her in every fibre of her nature.  Sometimes she was filled with remorse for the grief she had caused him, and sometimes with poignant distress, of doubt whether she had not after all been unjust to him.  Underlying all this remorse, all this doubt was a steadily growing consciousness that her love for him was in the very outset a mistake, an abnormal emotion, born of temporary and insufficient occasion, and therefore sure to have sooner or later proved too weak for the tests of life.  On the other hand, her thoughts of Parson Dorrance grew constantly warmer, tenderer, more assured.  His character, his love for her, his beautiful life, rose steadily higher and higher, and brighter and brighter on her horizon, as the lofty snow-clad peaks of a mountain land reveal themselves in all their grandeur to our vision only when we have journeyed away from their base.  Slowly the whole allegiance of her heart transferred itself to the dead man’s memory; slowly her grief for his loss deepened, and yet with the deepened grief came a certain new and holy joy.  It surely could not be impossible for him to know in heaven that she was his on earth?  As confidently as if she had been wedded to him here, she looked forward to the reunion with him there, and found in her secret consciousness of this eternal bond a hidden rapture, such as has been the stay of many a widowed heart through long lifetimes of loneliness.  This secret bond was like an impalpable yet impenetrable veil between her soul and the souls of all men who came into relation with her.  Men loved her and sought her,—­loved her warmly and sought her with long years of devotion.  The world often judged her uncharitably by reason of these friendships, which were only friendships, and yet pointed to a warmer regard than the world consents that friends may feel.  But there was never a man, of all the men who loved Mercy, who did not feel himself, spite of all her frank and loving intimacy, withheld, debarred, separated from her at a certain point, as if there stood drawn up there a cordon of viewless spirits.

The one grief above which she could not wholly rise, which at times smote her and bowed her down, was her sense of her loss in being childless.  The heart of mother was larger in her even than the heart of wife.  Her longing for children of her own was so great that it was often more than she could bear to watch little children at their play.  She stood sometimes at her window at dusk, and watched the poor laboring men and women going home, leading or carrying their children; and it seemed as if her heart would break.  Everywhere, her eye noted the swarming groups of children, poor, uncared for, so often unwelcome; and she said sadly to herself, “So many! so many! and not one for me.”  Yet she never felt any desire to adopt children.  She distrusted her own patience and justice too much; and she feared too deeply the development of hereditary traits which she could not conquer; “I might find that I had taken a liar,” she thought; “and I should hate him.”