only she did not know where it lay.  O Stephen, my darling, I do implore you not to do this great wrong.  You will certainly come to see, sooner or later, that it was a dishonest act; and then it will be too late to undo it.  If I thought that by talking with you I could make you see it as I do, I would come to you at once.  But I keep clinging to the hope that you will see it of yourself, that a sudden realization of it will burst upon you like a great light.  Don’t speak so angrily to me of calling you a thief.  I never used the word.  I never could.  I know the act looks to you right, or you would not commit it.  But it is terrible to me that it should look so to you.  I feel, darling, as if you were color-blind, and I saw you about to pick a most deadly fruit, whose color ought to warn every one from touching it; but you, not seeing the color, did not know the danger; and I must save you at all hazards, at all costs.  Oh, what shall I say, what shall I say!  How can I make you see the truth?  God help us if I do not; for such an act as this on your part would put an impassable gulf between our souls for ever.  Your loving,

“Mercy.”

Stephen’s letter was in curter phrase.  Writing was not to him a natural form of expression.  Even of joyous or loving words he was chary, and much more so of their opposites.  His life-long habit of repression of all signs of annoyance, all complaints, all traces of suffering, told still more on his written words than on his daily speech and life.  His letter sounded harder than it need for this reason; seemed to have been written in antagonism rather than in grief, and so did injustice to his feeling.

“My dear mercy,—­It is always a mistake for people to try to impose their own standards of right and wrong on others.  It gives me very great pain to wound you in any way, you know that; and to wound you in such a way as this gives me the greatest possible pain.  But I cannot make your conscience mine.  If this money had not seemed to me to be justly my own, I should never have thought of taking it.  As it does seem to me to be justly my own, your believing it to be another’s ought not to change my action.  If I had only my own future to consider, I might give it up, for the sake of your peace of mind.  But it is not so.  I have a helpless invalid dependent on me; and one of the hardest things in my life to bear has always been the fear that I might lose my health, and be unable to earn even the poor living we now have.  This sum, small as it is, will remove that fear, will enable me to insure for my mother a reasonable amount of comfort as long as she lives; and I cannot give it up.  I do not suppose, either, that it would make any difference in your feeling if I gave it up solely to please you, and not because I thought it wrong to keep it.  How any act which I honestly believe to be right, and which you know I honestly believe to be right, can put ’an impassable gulf between our souls for ever,’ I do not understand.  But, if’ it seems so to you, I can only submit; and I will try to forget that you ever said to me, ’I shall trust you till I die!’ O Mercy, Mercy, ask yourself if you are just!