As she reached middle age, this unsatisfied desire ceased to be so great a grief.  She became more and more like a motherly friend to the young people surrounding her.  Her house was a home to them all, and she reproduced in her own life very nearly the relation which Parson Dorrance had held to the young people of Danby.  Her friend Lizzy Hunter was now the mother of four girls, all in their first young womanhood.  They all strove eagerly for the privilege of living with “Aunt Mercy,” and went in turn to spend whole seasons with her.

On Stephen White’s thirty-sixth birthday, his mother died.  The ten years which had passed since Mercy left him had grown harder and harder, day by day; but he bore the last as silently and patiently as he bore the first, and Mrs. White’s last words to the gray-haired man who bent over her bed were,—­

“You have been a good boy, Steve,—­a good boy.  You’ll have some rest now.”

Since the day he bade good-by to Mercy in the room from which Parson Dorrance had just been buried, Stephen had never written to her, never heard from her, except as all the world heard from her, in her published writings.  These he read eagerly, and kept them carefully in scrap-books.  He took great delight in collecting all the copies of her verses.  Sometimes a little verse of hers would go the rounds of the newspapers for months, and each reappearance of it was a new pleasure to Stephen.  He knew most of them by heart; and he felt that he knew Mercy still, as well as he knew her when she looked up in his face.  On the night of his mother’s death he wrote to her these words:—­

“Mercy,—­It is ten years since we parted.  I love you as I loved you then.  I shall never love any other woman.  I am free now.  My mother has died this night.  May I come and see you?  I ask nothing of you, except to be your friend.  Can I not be that?

“Stephen.”

If a ghost of one dead for ten years had entered her presence, Mercy had hardly been more startled.  Stephen had ceased to be a personality to her.  Striving very earnestly with herself to be kind, and to do for this stranger whom she knew not what would be the very best and most healing thing for his soul, Mercy wrote to him as follows:—­

“Dear Stephen,—­Your note was a very great surprise to me.  I am most heartily thankful that you are at last free to live your life like other men.  I think that the future ought to hold some very great and good gifts in store for you, to reward you for your patience.  I have never known any human being so patient as you.

“You must forgive me for saying that I do not believe it is possible for us to be friends.  I could be yours, and would be glad to be so.  But you could not be mine while you continue so to set me apart from all other women, as you say you do, in your affection.  I am truly grieved that you do this, and I hope that in your new free life you will very soon find other relations which will make you forget your old one with me.  I did you a great harm, but we were both ignorant of our mistake.  I pray that it may yet be repaired, and that you may soon be at rest in a happy home with a wife and children.  Then I should be glad to see you:  until then, it is not best.