The New Magdalen

RECOVERING from the first overpowering sensation of surprise, Mercy

rapidly advanced, eager to say her first penitent words. Grace stopped

her by a warning gesture of the hand. "No nearer to me," she said, with

a look of contemptuous command. "Stay where you are."

Mercy paused. Grace's reception had startled her. She instinctively took

the chair nearest to her to support herself. Grace raised a warning hand

for the second time, and issued another command: "I forbid you to be

seated in my presence. You have no right to be in this house at all.

Remember, if you please, who you are, and who I am."

The tone in which those words were spoken was an insult in itself. Mercy

suddenly lifted her head; the angry answer was on her lips. She checked

it, and submitted in silence. "I will be worthy of Julian Gray's

confidence in me," she thought, as she stood patiently by the chair. "I

will bear anything from the woman whom I have wronged."

In silence the two faced each other; alone together, for the first time

since they had met in the French cottage. The contrast between them was

strange to see. Grace Roseberry, seated in her chair, little and lean,

with her dull white complexion, with her hard, threatening face, with

her shrunken figure clad in its plain and poor black garments, looked

like a being of a lower sphere, compared with Mercy Merrick, standing

erect in her rich silken dress; her tall, shapely figure towering

over the little creature before her; her grand head bent in graceful

submission; gentle, patient, beautiful; a woman whom it was a privilege

to look at and a distinction to admire. If a stranger had been told that

those two had played their parts in a romance of real life--that one of

them was really connected by the ties of relationship with Lady Janet

Roy, and that the other had successfully attempted to personate her--he

would inevitably, if it had been left to him to guess which was which,

have picked out Grace as the counterfeit and Mercy as the true woman.

Grace broke the silence. She had waited to open her lips until she had

eyed her conquered victim all over, with disdainfully minute attention,

from head to foot.

"Stand there. I like to look at you," she said, speaking with a spiteful

relish of her own cruel words. "It's no use fainting this time. You

have not got Lady Janet Roy to bring you to. There are no gentlemen here

to-day to pity you and pick you up. Mercy Merrick, I have got you at

last. Thank God, my turn has come! You can't escape me now!"

All the littleness of heart and mind which had first shown itself in

Grace at the meeting in the cottage, when Mercy told the sad story of

her life, now revealed itself once more. The woman who in those

past times had felt no impulse to take a suffering and a penitent

fellow-creature by the hand was the same woman who could feel no pity,

who could spare no insolence of triumph, now. Mercy's sweet voice

answered her patiently, in low, pleading tones.