measureless Eternity!
Be glad, O stream, O sea, blest equally!
And thou whose words have helped to teach
Me this,--my unknown friend,--for each
Kind thought, warm thanks.
Only the stream can know
How at such words the long leagues lighter grow.

All these new interests and occupations, while they did not in the least
weaken her loyalty to Stephen, filled her thoughts healthfully and
absorbingly, and left her no room for any such passionate longing and
brooding as Stephen poured out to her in his letters. He looked in vain
for any response to these expressions. Sometimes, unable to bear the
omission any longer, he would ask her pathetically why she did not say
that she longed to see him. Her reply was characteristic:--

"You ask me, dear, why I do not say that I long to see you. I am not sure
that I ever do long, in the sense in which you use the word. I know that I
cannot see you till next winter, just as I used to know every morning that
I could not see you until night; and the months between now and then seem
to me one solid interval of time to be filled up and made the most of,
just as the interval of the daytime between your going away in the morning
and coming home at night used to seem to me. I do not think, dear Stephen,
there is a moment of any day when I have not an under current of
consciousness of you; but it is not a longing for the sight of you. Are
you sure, darling, that the love which takes perpetual shape in such
longings is the strongest love?"

Little by little, phrases like this sank into Stephen's mind, and
gradually crystallized into a firm conviction that Mercy was being weaned
from him. It was not so. It was only that separation and its surer tests
were adjusting to a truer level the relation between them. She did not
love him one whit less; but she was taking the position which belonged to
her stronger and finer organization. If she had ever lived by his side as
his wife, the same change would have come; but her never-failing
tenderness would have effectually covered it from his recognition, and hid
it from her own, so long as he looked into her eyes with pleading love,
and she answered with woman's fondness. No realization of inequality could
ever have come. It is, after all, the flesh and blood of the loved one
which we idealize. There is in love's sacraments a "real presence," which
handling cannot make us doubt. It is when we go apart and reflect that our
reas