nse of horror, mentally. The letter fell
to the floor. She did not observe it. A half-hour passed, and she did not
know that it had been a moment. Gradually, her brain began to rouse into
activity again, and strove confusedly with the thoughts which crowded on
it.

"That would be stealing. He can't mean it. Stephen can't be a thief."
Half-formed, incoherent sentences like these floated in her mind, seemed
to be floating in the air, pronounced by hissing voices.

She pressed her hands to her temples, and sprang to her feet. The letter
rustled on the floor, as her gown swept over it. She turned and looked at
it, as if it were a living thing she would kill. She stooped to pick it
up, and then recoiled from it. She shrank from the very paper. All the
vehemence of her nature was roused. As in the moment of drowning people
are said to review in one swift flash of consciousness their whole lives,
so now in this moment did Mercy look back over the months of her life with
Stephen. Her sense of the baseness of his action now was like a lightning
illuming every corner of the past: every equivocation, every concealment,
every subterfuge he had practised, stood out before her, bare, stripped of
every shred of apology or excuse. "He lies; he has always lied. Why should
he not steal?" she exclaimed. "It is only another form of the same thing.
He stole me, too; and he made me steal him. He is dishonest to the very
core. How did I ever love such a man? What blinded me to his real nature?"

Then a great revulsion of feeling, of tenderness toward Stephen, would
sweep over her, and drown all these thoughts. "O my poor, brave, patient
darling! He never meant to do any thing wrong in his life. He does not see
things as I do: no human soul could see clearly, standing where he stands.
There is a moral warp in his nature, for which he is no more responsible
than a tree is responsible for having grown into a crooked shape when it
was broken down by heavy stones while it was a sapling. Oh, how unjust I
am to him! I will never think such thoughts of him again. My darling, my
darling! He did not stop to think in his excitement that the money was
not his. I daresay he has already seen it differently."

Like waves breaking on a beach, and rolling back again to meet higher
waves and be swallowed up in them, these opposing thoughts and emotions
struggled with each other in Mercy's bosom. Her heart and her judgment
were at variance, and the antagonism