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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Weir of Hermiston by Robert Louis Stevenson: mercy, must submit to the shifty weather of "the mistress's" moods
without complaint, and be willing to take buffets or caresses according
to the temper of the hour. To Kirstie, thus situate and in the Indian
summer of her heart, which was slow to submit to age, the gods sent this
equivocal good thing of Archie's presence. She had known him in the
cradle and paddled him when he misbehaved; and yet, as she had not so
much as set eyes on him since he was eleven and had his last serious
illness, the tall, slender, refined, and rather melancholy young
gentleman of twenty came upon her with the shock of a new acquaintance.
He was "Young Hermiston," "the laird himsel' ": he had an air of
distinctive superiority, a cold straight glance of his black eyes, that
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