were killed. You would not know the
difference, and I should not be able to make you see it."

It was a strange thing that with all Stephen's jealousy of Mercy's
enlarged and enlarging life, of her ever-widening circle of friends, he
had no especial jealousy of Parson Dorrance. The Parson was Mercy's only
frequent visitor; and Stephen knew very well that he had become her
teacher and her guide, that she referred every question to his decision,
and was guided implicitly by his taste and wish in her writing and in her
studies. But, when Stephen was a boy in college, Parson Dorranee had
seemed to him an old man; and he now seemed venerable. Stephen could not
have been freer from a lover's jealousy of him, if he had been Mercy's own
father. Perhaps, if his instinct had been truer, it might have quickened
Mercy's. She was equally unaware of the real nature of the Parson's regard
for her. He did for her the same things he did for Lizzy, whom he called
his child. He came to see her no oftener, spoke to her no more
affectionately: she believed that she and Lizzy were sisters together in
his fatherly heart.

When she was undeceived, the shock was very great: it was twofold,--a
shock to her sense of loyalty to Stephen, a shock to her tender love for
Parson Dorrance. It was true, as she had said to Lizzy, that she would
have died to give him a pleasure; and yet she was forced to inflict on him
the hardest of all pains. Every circumstance attending it made it harder;
made it seem to Mercy always in after life, as she looked back upon it,
needlessly hard,--cruelly, malignantly hard.

It was in the early autumn. The bright colors which had thrilled Mercy
with such surprise and pleasure on her first arrival in Penfield were
glowing again on the trees, it seemed to her brighter than before. Purple
asters and golden-rod waved on the roadsides and in the fields; and blue
gentians, for which Penfield was famous, were blooming everywhere. Parson
Dorrance came one day to take Lizzy and Mercy over to his "Parish," as he
called "The Cedars." They had often been with him there; and Mercy had
been for a long time secretly hoping that he would ask her to help him in
teaching the negroes. The day was one of those radiant and crystalline
days peculiar to the New England autumn. On such days, joy becomes
inevitable even to inert and lifeless natures: to enthusiastic and
spontaneous ones, the exhilaration of the air and the sun is as
intoxicating