"I wonder if she did not all along believe there was something wrong about the mortgage ?" and Mercy's suspicious thoughts and conjectures ran far back into the past, fastening on the beginnings of all this trouble.

She recollected old Mr.Wheeler's warnings about Stephen, in the first weeks of her stay in Penfield.

She recollected Parson Dorrance's expression, when he found out that she had paid her rent in advance.

She tortured herself by reviewing minutely every little manoeuvre she had known of Stephen's practising to conceal his relation with her.
Let Mercy once distrust a person in one particular, and she distrusted him in all.

Let one act of his life be wrong, and she believed that his every act was wrong in motive, or in relation to others, however specious and fair it might be made to appear.