No. Lady Janet's brief
allusion to her relative had not led her into alluding to him by his
name. Mercy was still as ignorant as ever that the preacher at the
Refuge and the nephew of her benefactress were one and the same man. Her
memory was busy now with the tribute which Lady Janet had paid to her at
the outset of the interview between them: "It is hardly too much to say,
Grace, that I bless the day when you first came to me." For the moment
there was balm for her wounded spirit in the remembrance of those words.
Grace Roseberry herself could surely have earned no sweeter praise than
the praise that she had won. The next instant she was seized with a
sudden horror of her own successful fraud. The sense of her degradation
had never been so bitterly present to her as at that moment. If she
could only confess the truth--if she could innocently enjoy her harmless
life at Mablethorpe House--what a grateful, happy woman she might be!
Was it possible (if she made the confession) to trust to her own good
conduct to plead her excuse? No! Her calmer sense warned her that it
was hopeless. The place she had won--honestly won--in Lady Janet's
estimation had been obtained by a trick. Nothing could alter, nothing
could excuse, _that_. She took out her handkerchief and dashed away
the useless tears that had gathered in her eyes, and tried to turn her
thoughts some other way. What was it Lady Janet had said on going into
the library? She had said she was coming back to speak about Horace.
Mercy guessed what the object was; she knew but too well what Horace
wanted of her. How was she to meet the emergency? In the name of Heaven,
what was to be done? Could she let the man who loved her--the man whom
she loved--drift blindfold into marriage with such a woman as she had
been? No! it was her duty to warn him. How? Could she break his heart,
could she lay his life waste by speaking the cruel words which might
part them forever? "I can't tell him! I won't tell him!" she burst
out, passionately. "The disgrace of it would kill me!" Her varying mood
changed as the words escaped her. A reckless defiance of her own better
nature--that saddest of all the forms in which a woman's misery can
express itself--filled her heart with its poisoning bitterness. She sat
down again on the sofa with eyes that glittered and cheeks suffused with
an angry red. "I am no worse than another woman!" she thought. "Another
woman might have married him for his money."