stand firm.

The secret which she had now for nearly a year kept from her mother was a
very harmless one. To people of the world, it would appear so trivial a
thing, that the conscience which could feel itself wounded by reticence on
such a point would seem hardly worth a sneer. Mr. Allen, who had been
Mercy's teacher for three years, had early seen in her a strong poetic
impulse, and had fostered and stimulated it by every means in his power.
He believed that in the exercise of this talent she would find the best
possible help for her loneliness and comfort for her sorrow. He recognized
clearly that, to so exceptional a nature as Mercy's, a certain amount of
isolation was inevitable, all through her life, however fortunate she
might be in entering into new and wider relations. The loneliness of
intense individuality is the loneliest loneliness in the world,--a
loneliness which crowds only aggravate, and which even the closest and
happiest companionship can only in part cure. The creative faculty is the
most inalienable and uncontrollable of individualities. It is at once its
own reward and its own penalty: until it has conquered the freedom of its
own city, in which it must for ever dwell, more or less apart, it is only
a prisoner in the cities of others. All this Mr. Allen felt for Mercy,
recognized in Mercy. He felt and recognized it by the instinct of love,
rather than by any intellectual perception. Intellectually, he was, in
spite of his superior culture, far Mercy's inferior. He had been brave
enough and manly enough to recognize this, and also to recognize what it
took still more manliness to recognize,--that she could never love a man
of his temperament. It would have been very easy for him to love Mercy. He
was not a man of a passionate nature; but he felt himself strangely
stirred whenever he looked into her sensitive, orchid-like face. He felt
in every fibre of him that to have the whole love of such a woman would be
bewildering joy; yet never for one moment did he allow himself to think of