ly sensitive. She
is a most interesting and absorbing person,--one entirely unique in my
experience. Living with her, as you will, it will be impossible for you
not to influence her strongly, one way or the other; and I want to enlist
your help to carry on the work I have begun. She owes it to herself and to
the world not to let her mind be inactive. I am very much mistaken if she
has not within her the power to write poems, which shall take place among
the work that lasts."

Mr. Allen read this letter over several times, and then, with a gesture of
impatience, tore the sheets down the middle, and threw them into the fire,
exclaiming,--

"Pshaw! as if there were any use in sending a man a portrait of a woman he
is to see every day. If Stephen is the person to amount to any thing in
her life, he will recognize her. If he is not, all my descriptions of her
will be thrown away. It is best to let things take their own course."

After some deliberation, he decided to take a step, which he would never
have taken, had Mercy not been going away from his influence,--a step
which he had again and again said to himself he would hot risk, lest the
effect might be to hinder her intellectual growth. He sent two of her
poems to a friend of his, who was the editor of one of the leading
magazines in the country. The welcome they met exceeded even his
anticipations. By the very next mail, he received a note from his friend,
enclosing a check, which to Harley Allen's inexperience of such matters
seemed disproportionately large. "Your little Cape Cod girl is a wonder,
indeed," wrote the editor. "If she can keep on writing such verse as this,
she will make a name for herself. Send us some more: we'll pay her well
for it."

Mr. Allen was perplexed. He had not once thought of the verses being paid
for. He had thought that to see her poems in print might give Mercy a new
incentive to work, might rouse in her an ambition, which would in part
take the place of the stimulus which his teachings had given her. He very
much disliked to tell her what he had done, and to give to her the money
she had unwittingly earned. He feared that she would resent it; he feared
that she would be too elated by it; he feared a dozen different things in
as many minutes, as he sat turning the check over and over in his hands.
But his fears were all unfounded. Mercy had too genuine an artistic nature
to be elated, too much simplicity to be offended. Her first emotio