iended her in her
sorest need. But the repeated betrayals of Horace's jealous suspicion
of Julian warned her that she would only be surrounding herself with
new difficulties, and be placing Julian in a position of painful
embarrassment, if she admitted him to a private interview while Horace
was in the house.

The one course left to take was the course that she had adopted.
Determining to address the narrative of the Fraud to Julian in the form
of a letter, she arranged to add, at the close, certain instructions,
pointing out to him the line of conduct which she wished him to pursue.

These instructions contemplated the communication of her letter to Lady
Janet and to Horace in the library, while Mercy--self-confessed as the
missing woman whom she had pledged herself to produce--awaited in the
adjoining room whatever sentence it pleased them to pronounce on her.
Her resolution not to screen herself behind Julian from any consequences
which might follow the confession had taken root in her mind from the
moment when Horace had harshly asked her (and when Lady Janet had joined
him in asking) why she delayed her explanation, and what she was keeping
them waiting for. Out of the very pain which those questions inflicted,
the idea of waiting her sentence in her own person in one room, while
her letter to Julian was speaking for her in another, had sprung
to life. "Let them break my heart if they like," she had thought to
herself, in the self-abasement of that bitter moment; "it will be no
more than I have deserved."

She locked her door and opened her writing-desk. Knowing what she had to
do, she tried to collect herself and do it.

The effort was in vain. Those persons who study writing as an art
are probably the only persons who can measure the vast distance which
separates a conception as it exists in the mind from the reduction
of that conception to form and shape in words. The heavy stress of
agitation that had been laid on Mercy for hours together had utterly
unfitted her for the delicate and difficult process of arranging the
events of a narrative in their due sequence and their due proportion
toward each other. Again and again she tried to begin her letter, and
again and again she was baffled by the same hopeless confusion of ideas.
She gave up the struggle in despair.

A sense of sinking at her heart, a weight of hysterical oppression on
her bosom, warned her not to leave herself unoccupied, a prey to morbid