Slowly there crept into her feeling towards him a certain something which was akin to scorn,--the most fatal of deaths to love.

The hateful word "thief" seemed to be perpetually ringing in her ears.

When she read accounts of robberies, of defalcations, of breaches of trust, she found herself always drawing parallels between the conduct of these criminals and Stephen's.

The secrecy, the unassailable safety of his crime, seemed to her to make it inexpressibly more odious.
"I do believe," she thought to herself again and again, "that if he had been driven by his poverty to knocking men down on the highway, and robbing them of their pocket-books, I should not have so loathed it!" As the weeks went on, Mercy's unhappiness increased rather than diminished.

There seemed an irreconcilible conflict between her love and every other emotion in her soul.