She made an eager step forward.

If he had returned, she would have thrown herself into his arms, and cried out, "O Stephen, I do love you, I do trust you." But Stephen made an inexorable gesture of his hand, which said more than any words, "No! no! do not deceive yourself," and was gone.
And thus they parted for ever, this man and this woman who had been for two years all in all to each other, who had written on each other's hearts and lives characters which eternity itself could never efface.
Hope lived long in Stephen's heart.

He built too much on the memories of his magnetic power over Mercy, and he judged her nature too much by his own.

He would have loved and followed her to the end, in spite of her having become a very outcast of crime, if she had continued to love him; and it was simply impossible for him to conceive of her love's being either less or different.

But, when in a volume of poems which Mercy published one year after their parting, he read the following sonnet, he knew that all was indeed over:-- DIED.
Not by the death that kills the body.