the other door
which led into the hall.

As she turned and looked back into the dining-room a cry of astonishment
escaped her.

There--as if in answer to the aspiration which was still in her mind;
there, established in triumph on the chair that she had just left--sat
Grace Roseberry, in sinister silence, waiting for her.

CHAPTER XIX. THE EVIL GENIUS.

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