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!

Chapter VIII.

As the months went on, Mercy began to make friends. One person after
another observed her bright face, asked who she was, and came to seek her
out. "Who is that girl with fair hair and blue eyes, who, whenever you
meet her in the street, always looks as if she had just heard some good
news?" was asked one day. It was a noteworthy thing that this description
was so instantly recognized by the person inquired of, that he had