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Updated: September 20, 2025
It was a disappointment to discover that it cost him a terrible effort to pronounce Mabel's name, while the abrupt intelligence of her marriage had distracted him to incoherent ravings, which had nearly amounted to curses upon the authors of his pain. "And all for a woman who could bring herself, after being engaged to Frederic Chilton, to marry that dolt of a Dorrance!" she said, indignantly.
Parson Dorrance had in his youth been settled as a Congregationalist minister. But his love of literature and of science was even stronger than his love of preaching the gospel; and, after a very few years, he accepted a position as professor in a small college, in a town only four miles distant from the village in which Mercy had come to live. This was twenty-five years ago.
But Mercy was very shy of seeing the man for whom she felt such reverence, and had steadily refused to meet him. It was therefore with a certain air of triumphant satisfaction that Mrs. Hunter led Parson Dorrance to the rock where Mercy was sitting, and exclaimed, "There, Uncle Dorrance! here she is!"
"DORRANCE!" repeated Frederic, after his betrothed, when she rehearsed to him in their moonlight promenade upon the piazza the leading incidents of her brother's wooing. "She lives near Boston, you say, and her mother is a widow?" "Yes. What have you ever heard about her?" "Nothing whatever. I was startled by the name but very foolishly!
Then she uttered a sharp cry, as of one who had suddenly got a wound, and, burying her face in her hands, sank into a chair and began to cry convulsively. Parson Dorrance walked up and down the room. He dared not speak. He was not quite sure what Mercy's weeping meant; so hard is it, for a single moment, to wrench a great hope out of a man's heart. But, as she continued sobbing, he understood.
"That's the way with every thing in life, dear child," said Parson Dorrance. "The thing that shall be is the thing for which all the powers of nature are at work. We, you and Lizzy and I, will drop off our stems presently, I, a good deal the first, for you and Lizzy have the blessing of youth, but I am old." "You are not old! You are the youngest person I know," exclaimed Mercy, impetuously.
He would have spoken to her in the mildest and tenderest of tones, while in his heart he wished her dead. So far can a fine fastidiousness, allied to a sentiment of compassion, go towards making a man a consummate hypocrite. Parson Dorrance came often to see Mercy, but always with Lizzy Hunter.
If a little church were without a pastor and could not find one, or were in debt and could not afford to hire one, it sent to ask Parson Dorrance to supply the pulpit; and he always went. Finally, not content with these ordinary and established channels for preaching the gospel, he sought out for himself a new one.
All the loving fatherhood of his nature was spent now on the young people of his town; and, by young people, I mean all between the ages of four and twenty. There was hardly a baby that did not know Parson Dorrance, and stretch out its arms to him; there was hardly a young man or a young woman who did not go to him with troubles or perplexities.
So inevitable and inextricable are pains and dilemmas when once we enter on the paths of concealment. Parson Dorrance was introduced to Mercy by Mrs. Hunter, a young married woman, who was fast becoming her most intimate friend. Mrs.
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