The New Magdalen

MERCY was alone.

She had secured one half hour of retirement in her own room, designing

to devote that interval to the writing of her confession, in the form of

a letter addressed to Julian Gray.

No recent change in her position had, as yet, mitigated her horror of

acknowledging to Horace and to Lady Janet that she had won her way to

their hearts in disguise. Through Julian only could she say the words

which were to establish Grace Roseberry in her right position in the

house.

How was her confession to be addressed to him? In writing? or by word of

mouth?

After all that had happened, from the time when Lady Janet's

appearance had interrupted them, she would have felt relief rather than

embarrassment in personally opening her heart to the man who had so

delicately understood her, who had so faithfully befriended her in her

sorest need. But the repeated betrayals of Horace's jealous suspicion

of Julian warned her that she would only be surrounding herself with

new difficulties, and be placing Julian in a position of painful

embarrassment, if she admitted him to a private interview while Horace

was in the house.

The one course left to take was the course that she had adopted.

Determining to address the narrative of the Fraud to Julian in the form

of a letter, she arranged to add, at the close, certain instructions,

pointing out to him the line of conduct which she wished him to pursue.

These instructions contemplated the communication of her letter to Lady

Janet and to Horace in the library, while Mercy--self-confessed as the

missing woman whom she had pledged herself to produce--awaited in the

adjoining room whatever sentence it pleased them to pronounce on her.

Her resolution not to screen herself behind Julian from any consequences

which might follow the confession had taken root in her mind from the

moment when Horace had harshly asked her (and when Lady Janet had joined

him in asking) why she delayed her explanation, and what she was keeping

them waiting for. Out of the very pain which those questions inflicted,

the idea of waiting her sentence in her own person in one room, while

her letter to Julian was speaking for her in another, had sprung

to life. "Let them break my heart if they like," she had thought to

herself, in the self-abasement of that bitter moment; "it will be no

more than I have deserved."

She locked her door and opened her writing-desk. Knowing what she had to

do, she tried to collect herself and do it.

The effort was in vain. Those persons who study writing as an art

are probably the only persons who can measure the vast distance which

separates a conception as it exists in the mind from the reduction

of that conception to form and shape in words. The heavy stress of

agitation that had been laid on Mercy for hours together had utterly

unfitted her for the delicate and difficult process of arranging the

events of a narrative in their due sequence and their due proportion

toward each other. Again and again she tried to begin her letter, and

again and again she was baffled by the same hopeless confusion of ideas.

She gave up the struggle in despair.