victim all over, with disdainfully minute attention,
from head to foot.

"Stand there. I like to look at you," she said, speaking with a spiteful
relish of her own cruel words. "It's no use fainting this time. You
have not got Lady Janet Roy to bring you to. There are no gentlemen here
to-day to pity you and pick you up. Mercy Merrick, I have got you at
last. Thank God, my turn has come! You can't escape me now!"

All the littleness of heart and mind which had first shown itself in
Grace at the meeting in the cottage, when Mercy told the sad story of
her life, now revealed itself once more. The woman who in those
past times had felt no impulse to take a suffering and a penitent
fellow-creature by the hand was the same woman who could feel no pity,
who could spare no insolence of triumph, now. Mercy's sweet voice
answered her patiently, in low, pleading tones.

"I have not avoided you," she said. "I would have gone to you of my own
accord if I had known that you were here. It is my heartfelt wish to
own that I have sinned against you, and to make all the atonement that
I can. I am too anxious to deserve your forgiveness to have any fear of
seeing you."

Conciliatory as the reply was, it was spoken with a simple and modest
dignity of manner which roused Grace Roseberry to fury.

"How dare you speak to me as if you were any equal?" she burst out. "You
stand there and answer me as if you had your right and your place
in this house. You audacious woman! _I_ have my right and my place
here--and what am I obliged to do? I am obliged to hang about in the
grounds, and fly from the sight of the servants, and hide like a thief,
and wait like a beggar, and all for what? For the chance of having a
word with _you_. Yes! you, madam! with the air of the Refuge and the
dirt of the streets on you!"

Mercy's head sank lower; her hand trembled as it held by the back of the
chair.

It was hard to bear the reiterated insults heaped on her, but Julian's
influence still made itself felt. She answered as patiently as ever.

"If it is your pleasure to use hard words to me," she said, "I have no
right to resent them."

"You have no right to anything!" Grace retorted. "You have no right
to the gown on your back. Look at yourself, and look at Me!" Her eyes
traveled with a tigerish stare over Mercy's costly silk dress. "Who gave
you that dress? who gave you those jewels? I know! Lady Janet gave them
to Grace Roseberry. Are _you_ Grace Ro