Her reply was characteristic:-- "You ask me, dear, why I do not say that I long to see you.

I am not sure that I ever do long, in the sense in which you use the word.

I know that I cannot see you till next winter, just as I used to know every morning that I could not see you until night; and the months between now and then seem to me one solid interval of time to be filled up and made the most of, just as the interval of the daytime between your going away in the morning and coming home at night used to seem to me.

I do not think, dear Stephen, there is a moment of any day when I have not an under current of consciousness of you; but it is not a longing for the sight of you.

Are you sure, darling, that the love which takes perpetual shape in such longings is the strongest love ?" Little by little, phrases like this sank into Stephen's mind, and gradually crystallized into a firm conviction that Mercy was being weaned from him.