k at once into sleep, murmuring,--

"The darling! how she does love me! She shall never regret it,--never. We
can have a great deal of happiness together as it is; and if the time ever
should come," ...

Here his thoughts halted, and refused to be clothed in explicit phrase.
Never once had Stephen White permitted himself to think in words, even in
his most secret meditations, "When my mother dies, I shall be free." His
fine fastidiousness would shrink from it, as from the particular kind of
brutality and bad taste involved in a murder. If the whole truth could
have been known of Stephen's feeling about all crimes and sins, it would
have been found to be far more a matter of taste than of principle, of
instinct than of conviction.

Surely never in this world did love link together two souls more
diametrically opposite than Mercy Philbrick's and Stephen White's. It
needed no long study or especial insight into character to know which of
the two would receive the more and suffer the less, in the abnormal and
unfortunate relation on which they had entered. But no presentiment warned
Mercy of what lay before her. She was like a traveller going into a
country whose language he has never heard, and whose currency he does not
understand. However eloquent he may be in his own land, he is dumb and
helpless here; and of the fortune with which he was rich at home he is
robbed at every turn by false exchanges which impose on his ignorance.
Poor Mercy! Vaguely she felt that life was cruel to Stephen and to her;
but she accepted its cruelty to her as an inevitable part of her oneness
with him. Whatever he had to bear she must bear too, especially if he were
helped by her sharing the burden. And her heart glowed with happiness,
recalling the expression with which he had said,--

"Remember, Mercy, you are the one bright thing in my life."

She understood, or thought she understood, precisely the position in which
he was placed.

"Very possibly he has even promised his mother," she said to herself,
"even promised her he would never be married. It would be just like her to
exact such a promise from him, and never think any thing of it. And, even
if he has not, it is all the same. He knows very well no human being could
live in the house with her, to say nothing of his being so terribly poor.
Poor, dear Stephen! to think of our little rent being more than half his
income! Oh, if there were only some way in which I could contrive to gi