It looked very plain to Mercy in these first days.  It looked right, and it seemed very full of joy.  Her life seemed now rounded and complete.  It had a ruling motive, without which no life is satisfying; and that motive was the highest motive known to the heart,—­the desire to make another human being perfectly happy.  All hindrances and difficulties, all drawbacks and sacrifices, seemed less than nothing to her.  When she saw Stephen, she was happy because she saw him; and when she did not see him, she was happy because she had seen him, and would soon see him again.  Past, present, and future all melt into one great harmonious whole under the spell of love in a nature like Mercy’s.  They are like so many rooms in one great house; and in one or the other the loved being is always to be found, always at home, can never depart!  Could one be lonely for a moment in such a house?

Mercy’s perpetual and abiding joy at times terrified Stephen.  It was a thing so foreign to his own nature that it seemed to him hardly natural.  Calm acquiescence he could understand,—­serene endurance:  he himself never chafed at the barriers, little or great, which kept him from Mercy.  But there were many days when his sense of deprivation made him sad, subdued, and quiet.  When, in these moods, he came into Mercy’s presence, and found her radiant, buoyant, mirthful even, he wondered; and sometimes he questioned.  He strove to find out the secret of her joy.  There seemed to him no legitimate reason for it.

“Why, to see that I make you glad, Stephen,” she would say.  “Is not that enough?  Or even, when I cannot make you glad, just to love you is enough.”

“Mercy, how did you ever come to love me?” he said once, stung by a sense of his own unworthiness.  “How do you know you love me, after all?”

“How do I know I love you!” she exclaimed.  “Can any one ever tell that, I wonder?  I know it by this:  that every thing in the whole world, even down to the smallest grass-blade, seems to me different because you are alive.”  She said these words with a passionate vehemence, and tears in her eyes.  Then, changing in a second to a mischievous, laughing mood, she said,—­

“Yes:  you make all that odds to me.  But let us not talk about loving each other, Stephen.  That’s the way children do with their flower-seeds,—­keep pulling them up, to see how they grow.”

That night, Mercy gave Stephen this sonnet,—­the first words she had written out of the great wellspring of her love:—­

“How was it?”

Why ask, dear one?  I think I cannot tell,
More than I know how clouds so sudden lift
From mountains, or how snowflakes float and drift,
Or springs leave hills.  One secret and one spell
All true things have.  No sunlight ever fell
With sound to bid flowers open.  Still and swift
Come sweetest things on earth. 
So comes true gift
Of Love, and so we know that it is well. 
Sure tokens also, like the cloud, the snow,
And silent flowing of the mountain-springs,
The new gift of true loving always brings. 
In clearer light, in purer paths, we go: 
New currents of deep joy in common things
We find.  These are the tokens, dear, we know!