n which would have offended the most patient
woman living. Grace drew back indignantly. "Ah!" she cried, "you are
cruel."

"I am kind," answered the nurse, speaking more sternly than ever.

"Is it kind to keep me at a distance? I have told you my story."

The nurse's voice rose excitedly. "Don't tempt me to speak out," she
said; "you will regret it."

Grace declined to accept the warning. "I have placed confidence in you,"
she went on. "It is ungenerous to lay me under an obligation, and then
to shut me out of your confidence in return."

"You _will_ have it?" said Mercy Merrick. "You _shall_ have it! Sit down
again." Grace's heart began to quicken its beat in expectation of the
disclosure that was to come. She drew her chair closer to the chest on
which the nurse was sitting. With a firm hand Mercy put the chair back
to a distance from her. "Not so near me!" she said, harshly.

"Why not?"

"Not so near," repeated the sternly resolute voice. "Wait till you have
heard what I have to say."

Grace obeyed without a word more. There was a momentary silence. A faint
flash of light leaped up from the expiring candle, and showed Mercy
crouching on the chest, with her elbows on her knees, and her face
hidden in her hands. The next instant the room was buried in obscurity.
As the darkness fell on the two women the nurse spoke.

CHAPTER II. MAGDALEN--IN MODERN TIMES.

"WHEN your mother was alive were you ever out with her after nightfall
in the streets of a great city?"

In those extraordinary terms Mercy Merrick opened the confidential
interview which Grace Roseberry had forced on her. Grace answered,
simply, "I don't understand you."

"I will put it in another way," said the nurse. Its unnatural hardness
and sternness of tone passed away from her voice, and its native
gentleness and sadness returned, as she made that reply. "You read the
newspapers like the rest of the world," she went on; "have you ever
read of your unhappy fellow-creatures (the starving outcasts of the
population) whom Want has driven into Sin?"

Still wondering, Grace answered that she had read of such things often,
in newspapers and in books.

"Have you heard--when those starving and sinning fellow-creatures
happened to be women--of Refuges established to protect and reclaim
them?"

The wonder in Grace's mind passed away, and a vague suspicion of
something painful to come took its place. "These are extraordinary
questions," she said,