The New Magdalen

He had mastered his temper at last: he spoke with dignity, and he spoke

to the point. His position was unassailable; he claimed nothing but his

right.

"My choice was made," Mercy answered, "when I gave you my promise

upstairs."

She waited a little, struggling to control herself on the brink of the

terrible revelation that was coming. Her eyes dropped before his;

her heart beat faster and faster; but she struggled bravely. With a

desperate courage she faced the position. "If you are ready to listen,"

she went on, "I am ready to tell you why I insisted on having the police

officer sent out of the house."

Horace held up his hand warningly.

"Stop!" he said; "that is not all."

His infatuated jealousy of Julian (fatally misinterpreting her

agitation) distrusted her at the very outset. She had limited herself

to clearing up the one question of her interference with the officer

of justice. The other question of her relations with Julian she had

deliberately passed over. Horace instantly drew his own ungenerous

conclusion.

"Let us not misunderstand one another," he said. "The explanation of

your conduct in the other room is only one of the explanations which

you owe me. You have something else to account for. Let us begin with

_that_, if you please."

She looked at him in unaffected surprise.

"What else have I to account for?" she asked.

He again repeated his reply to Lady Janet.

"I have told you already," he said. "I don't understand your

confidential relations with Julian Gray."

Mercy's color rose; Mercy's eyes began to brighten.

"Don't return to that!" she cried, with an irrepressible outbreak of

disgust. "Don't, for God's sake, make me despise you at such a moment as

this!"

His obstinacy only gathered fresh encouragement from that appeal to his

better sense.

"I insist on returning to it."

She had resolved to bear anything from him--as her fit punishment for

the deception of which she had been guilty. But it was not in womanhood

(at the moment when the first words of her confession were trembling on

her lips) to endure Horace's unworthy suspicion of her. She rose from

her seat and met his eye firmly.

"I refuse to degrade myself, and to degrade Mr. Julian Gray, by

answering you," she said.

"Consider what you are doing," he rejoined. "Change your mind, before it

is too late!"

"You have had my reply."

Those resolute words, that steady resistance, seemed to infuriate him.

He caught her roughly by the arm.

"You are as false as hell!" he cried. "It's all over between you and

me!"

The loud threatening tone in which he had spoken penetrated through

the closed door of the dining-room. The door instantly opened. Julian

returned to the library.

He had just set foot in the room, when there was a knock at the

other door--the door that opened on the hall. One of the men-servants

appeared, with a telegraphic message in his hand. Mercy was the first to

see it. It was the Matron's answer to the letter which she had sent to

the Refuge.