Read "Mercy Philbrick's Choice" by Helen Hunt Jackson online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
Within six hours after the receipt of this telegram, Mercy was on her way to Penfield. Her journey would take a night and part of a day. As the morning dawned, and she drew near the old familiar scenes, her heart was wrung with conflicting memories and hopes and fears. The whole landscape was dreary: the fields were dark and sodden, with narrow banks of discolored snow lying under the fences, and thin rims of ice along the edges of the streams and pools. The sky was gray; the bare trees were gray: all life looked gray and hopeless to Mercy. She had had an over-mastering presentiment from the moment when she read the telegram that she should reach Penfield too late to see Parson Dorrance alive. A strange certainty that he had died in the night settled upon her mind as soon as she waked from her troubled sleep; and when she reached Lizzy's door, and saw standing before it the undertaker's wagon, which she so well remembered, there was no shock of surprise to her in the sight.
At the first sound of Mercy's voice, Lizzy came swiftly forward, and fell upon her neck in a passion of crying.