I shall trust you to the day of my death." Perhaps nothing could illustrate better the difference between Mercy Philbrick's nature and Stephen White's, between her love for him and his for her, than the fact that, after this conversation, she lay awake far into the early hours of the morning, living over every word that he had spoken, looking resolutely and even joyously into the strange future which was opening before her, and scanning with loving intentness every chance that it could possibly hold for her ministrations to him.

He, on the other hand, laid his head on his pillow with a sense of dreamy happiness, and sank at once into sleep, murmuring,-- "The darling! how she does love me! She shall never regret it,--never.

We can have a great deal of happiness together as it is; and if the time ever should come," ...
Here his thoughts halted, and refused to be clothed in explicit phrase.
Never once had Stephen White permitted himself to think in words, even in his most secret meditations, "When my mother dies, I shall be free." His fine fastidiousness would shrink from it, as from the particular kind of brutality and bad taste involved in a murder.

If the whole truth could have been known of Stephen's feeling about all crimes and sins, it would have been found to be far more a matter of taste than of principle, of instinct than of conviction.
Surely never in this world did love link together two souls more diametrically opposite than Mercy Philbrick's and Stephen White's.

It needed no long study or especial insight into character to know which of the two would receive the more and suffer the less, in the abnormal and unfortunate relation on which they had entered.