I cannot be lover and culprit at once, as you are able to be lover and accuser, or judge.

I love you, I think, as deeply and tenderly as ever; but you yourself have made all expression of it impossible.
STEPHEN." This letter roused in Mercy most conflicting emotions.

Wounded feeling at its coldness, a certain admiration for its tone of immovable resolution, anger at what seemed to her Stephen's unjustifiable resentment of her effort to influence his action,--all these blended in one great pain which was well-nigh unbearable.

For the time being, her distress in regard to the money seemed cast into shadow and removed by all this suffering in her personal relation with Stephen; but the personal suffering had not so deep a foundation as the other.

Gradually, all sense of her own individual hurts in Stephen's words, in his acts, in the weakening of the bond which held them together, died out, and left behind it only a sense of bereavement and loss; while the first horror of Stephen's wrong-doing, of the hopeless lack in his moral nature, came back with twofold intensity.
This had its basis in convictions,--in convictions which were as strong as the foundations of the earth: the other had its basis in emotions, in sensibilities which might pass away or be dulled.
Spite of Stephen's having forbidden all reference to the subject, Mercy wrote letter after letter upon it, pleading sometimes humbly, sometimes vehemently.