no
hesitancy in replying,--

"Oh, that is a young widow from Cape Cod, a Mrs. Philbrick. She came last
winter with her mother, who is an invalid. They live in the old Jacobs
house with the Whites."

Among the friends whom Mercy thus met was a man who was destined to
exercise almost as powerful an influence as Stephen White over her life.
This was Parson Dorrance.

Parson Dorrance had in his youth been settled as a Congregationalist
minister. But his love of literature and of science was even stronger than
his love of preaching the gospel; and, after a very few years, he accepted
a position as professor in a small college, in a town only four miles
distant from the village in which Mercy had come to live. This was
twenty-five years ago. Parson Dorrance was now fifty-five years old. For a
quarter of a century, his name had been the pride, and his hand had been
the stay, of the college. It had had presidents of renown and professors
of brilliant attainments; but Parson Dorrance held a position more
enviable than all. Few lives of such simple and steadfast heroism have
ever been lived. Few lives have ever so stamped the mark of their
influence on a community. In the second year of his ministry, Mr. Dorrance
had married a very beautiful and brilliant woman. Probably no two young
people ever began married life with a fairer future before them than
these. Mrs. Dorrance was as exceptionally clever and cultured a person as
her husband; and she added to these rare endowments a personal beauty
which is said by all who knew her in her girlhood to have been marvellous.
But, as is so often the case among New England women of culture, the body
had paid the cost of the mind's estate; and, after the birth of her first
child, she sank at once into a hopeless invalidism,--an invalidism all the
more difficult to bear, and to be borne with, that it took the shape of
distressing nervous maladies which no medical skill could alleviate. The
brilliant mind became almost a wreck, and yet retained a preternatural
restlessness and activity. Many regarded her condition as insanity, and
believed that Mr. Dorrance erred in not giving her up to the care of those
making mental disorders a specialty. But his love and patience were
untiring. When her mental depression and suffering reached such a stage
that she could not safely see a human face but his, he shut himself up
with her in her darkened room till the crisis had passed. There were times
when