and could by no possibility stop.
He did not suffer as he had expected. Sometimes it seemed to him that he
did not suffer at all; and he was terrified at this very absence of
suffering. Then again he had hours and days of a dull despair, which was
worse than any more active form of suffering. Now he understood, he
thought, how in the olden time men had often withdrawn themselves from the
world after some great grief, and had lived long, stagnant lives in
deserts and caves. He had thought it would kill him to lose Mercy out of
his life. Now he felt sure that he should live to be a hundred years old;
should live by very help of the apathy into which he had sunk. Externally,
he seemed very little changed,--a trifle quieter, perhaps, and gentler.
His mother sometimes said to herself,--

"Steve is really getting old very fast for so young a man;" but she was
content with the change. It seemed to bring them nearer together, and made
her feel more at ease as to the possibility of his falling in love. Her
old suspicions and jealousies of Mercy had died out root and branch,
within three months after her departure. Stephen's unhesitating assurance
to her that he did not expect to write to Mercy had settled the question
in her mind once for all. If she had known that at the very moment when he
uttered these words he had one long letter from Mercy and another to her
lying in his pocket, the shock might well-nigh have killed her; for never
once in Mrs. White's most jealous and ill-natured hours had the thought
crossed her mind that her son would tell her a deliberate lie. He told it,
however, unflinchingly, in as gentle and even a tone and with as unruffled
a brow as he would have bade her good-morning. He had thought the whole
matter over, and deliberately resolved to do it. He did it to save her
from pain; and he had no more compunction about it than he would have had
about closing a blind, to shut out a sunlight too strong for her eyes.
What a terrible thing is the power which human beings have of deceiving
each other! Woe to any soul which trusts itself to any thing less than an
organic integrity of nature, to which a lie is impossible!

Mercy's letters disappointed Stephen. They were loving; but they were
concise, sensible, sometimes merry, and always cheerful. Her life was
constantly broadening; friends crowded around her; and her art was
becoming more and more to her every day. Her name was beginning to be
known, and her inf