This was the man whom Mercy Philbrick met early in her first summer at Penfield.  She had heard him preach twice, and had been so greatly impressed by his words and by his face that she longed very much to know him.  She had talked with Stephen about him, but had found that Stephen did not sympathize at all in her enthusiasm.  “The people over at Danby are all crazy about him, I think,” said Stephen.  “He is a very good man no doubt, and does no end of things for the college boys, that none of the other professors do.  But I think he is quixotic and sentimental; and all this stuff about those niggers at the Cedars is moonshine.  They’d pick his very pocket, I daresay, any day; and he’d never suspect them.  I know that lot too well.  The Lord himself couldn’t convert them.”

“Oh, Stephen!  I think you are wrong,” replied Mercy.  “Parson Dorrance is not sentimental, I am sure.  His sermons were clear and logical and terse,—­not a waste word in them; and his mouth and chin are as strong as an old Roman’s.”

Stephen looked earnestly at Mercy.  “Mercy,” said he, “I wonder if you would love me better if I were a preacher, and could preach clear, logical, and terse sermons?”

Mercy was impatient.  Already the self-centring of Stephen’s mind, his instant reverting from most trains of thought to their possible bearing on her love for him, had begun to irritate her.  It was so foreign to her own unconscious, free-souled acceptance and trust.

“Stephen,” she exclaimed, “I wish you wouldn’t say such things.  Besides seeming to imply a sort of distrust of my love for you, they are illogical; and you know there is nothing I hate like bad logic.”

Stephen made no reply.  The slightest approach to a disagreement between Mercy and himself gave him great pain and a sense of terror; and he took refuge instantly behind his usual shield of silence.  This also was foreign to Mercy’s habit and impulse.  When any thing went wrong, it was Mercy’s way to speak out honestly; to have the matter set in all its lights, until it could reach its true one.  She hated mystery; she hated reticence; she hated every thing which fell short of full and frank understanding of each other.

“Oh, Stephen!” she used to say often, “it is bad enough for us to be forced into keeping things back from the world.  Don’t let us keep any thing back from each other.”

Poor Mercy! the days were beginning to be hard for her.  Her face often wore a look of perplexed thought which was very new to it.  Still she never wavered for a moment in her devotion to Stephen.  If she had stood acknowledged before all the world as his wife, she could not have been any more single-hearted and unquestioning in her loyalty.

It was at a picnic in which the young people of both Danby and Penfield had joined that Mercy met Parson Dorrance.  No such gathering was ever thought complete without the Parson’s presence.  Again and again one might hear it said in the preliminary discussion:  “But we must find out first what day Parson Dorrance can go.  It won’t be any fun without him!”