27/34 He questioned you so gently, yet with such an air of right; he listened so observantly and sympathetically. He did not treat Mercy Philbrick as a stranger; for Mrs.Hunter had told him already all she knew of her friend's life, and had showed him several of Mercy's poems, which had surprised him much by their beauty, and still more by their condensation of thought. They seemed to him almost more masculine than feminine; and he had unconsciously anticipated that in seeing Mercy he would see a woman of masculine type. He could not associate this slight, fair girl, with a child's honesty and appeal in her eyes, with the forceful words he had read from her pen. |