“If Mr. Allen tries till he dies, he will never convinc me that it is not deceiving people to make them think you’re glad to see them when you’re not,” Mercy said to herself often, as, with flushed cheeks and tears in her eyes, she walked home after these conversations.  “He may make me think that it is right to deceive them rather than to make them unhappy.  It almost seems as if it must be; yet, if we once admitted that, where should we ever stop?  It seems to me that would be a very dangerous doctrine.  A lie’s a lie, let whoever will call it fine names, and pass it off as a Christian duty The Bible does not say, ’Thou shalt not lie, except when it is necessary to lie, to avoid hurting thy neighbor’s feelings,’ It says, ‘Thou shalt not lie.’  Oh, what a horrible word ‘lie’ is!  It stings like a short, sharp stroke with a lash.”  And Mercy would turn away from the thought with a shudder, and resolutely force hersef to think of something else.  Sometimes she would escape from the perplexity for weeks:  chance would so favor her, that no opportunity for what she felt to be deceit would occur; but, in these intervals of relief, her tortured conscience seemed only to renew its voices, and spring upon her all the more fiercely on the next occasion.  The effect, of all these indecisive conflicts upon Mercy’s character had not been good.  They had left her morally bruised, and therefore abnormally sensitive to the least touch.  She was in danger of becoming either a fanatic for truth, or indifferent to it.  Paradoxcal as it may seem, she was in almost as much danger of the one as of the other.  But always, when our hurts are fast healing without help, the help comes.  It is probable that there is to-day on the earth a cure, either in herb or stone or spring, for every ill which men’s bodies can know.  Ignorance and accident may hinder us long from them, but sooner or later the race shall come to possess them all.  So with souls.  There is the ready truth, the living voice, the warm hand, or the final experience, waiting for each soul’s need.  We do not die till we have found them.  There were yet to enter into Mercy Philbrick’s life a new light and a new force, by the help of which she would see clearly and stand firm.

The secret which she had now for nearly a year kept from her mother was a very harmless one.  To people of the world, it would appear so trivial a thing, that the conscience which could feel itself wounded by reticence on such a point would seem hardly worth a sneer.  Mr. Allen, who had been Mercy’s teacher for three years, had early seen in her a strong poetic impulse, and had fostered and stimulated it by every means in his power.  He believed that in the exercise of this talent she would find the best possible help for her loneliness and comfort for her sorrow.  He recognized clearly that, to so exceptional a nature as Mercy’s, a certain amount of isolation was inevitable, all through her life, however fortunate she might be in entering into new and wider relations.