She was most loyally affectionate to her mother, but the sentiment was not a wholly filial one.

There was too much reversal of the natural order of the protector and the protected in it; and her life was on too different a plane of thought, feeling, and interest from the life of the uncultured, undeveloped, childish, old woman.

Yet no one who saw them together would have detected any trace of this shortcoming in Mercy's feeling towards her mother.

She had in her nature a fine and lofty fibre of loyalty which could never condescend even to parley with a thought derogatory to its object; was lifted above all consciousness of the possibility of any other course.

This is a sort of organic integrity of affection, which is to those who receive it a tower of strength, that is impregnable to all assault except that of death itself.