The works of art were all portraits; the books were all presentation
copies from the authors. It was Lady Janet's fancy to associate her
bedroom with memorials of the various persons whom she had known in the
long course of her life--all of them more or less distinguished, most of
them, by this time, gathered with the dead.

She sat near her writing-table, lying back in her easy-chair--the living
realization of the picture which Julian's description had drawn. Her
eyes were fixed on a photographic likeness of Mercy, which was so raised
upon a little gilt easel as to enable her to contemplate it under the
full light of the lamp. The bright, mobile old face was strangely and
sadly changed. The brow was fixed; the mouth was rigid; the whole face
would have been like a mask, molded in the hardest forms of passive
resistance and suppressed rage, but for the light and life still thrown
over it by the eyes. There was something unutterably touching in the
keen hungering tenderness of the look which they fixed on the portrait,
intensified by an underlying expression of fond and patient reproach.
The danger which Julian so wisely dreaded was in the rest of the face;
the love which he had so truly described was in the eyes alone. _They_
still spoke of the cruelly profaned affection which had been the one
immeasurable joy, the one inexhaustible hope of Lady Janet's closing
life. The brow expressed nothing but her obstinate determination to
stand by the wreck of that joy, to rekindle the dead ashes of that hope.
The lips were only eloquent of her unflinching resolution to ignore the
hateful present and to save the sacred past. "My idol may be shattered,
but none of you shall know it. I stop the march of discovery; I
extinguish the light of truth. I am deaf to your words; am blind to your
proofs. At seventy years old, my idol is my life. It shall be my idol
still."

The silence in the bedroom was broken by a murmuring of women's voices
outside the door.

Lady Janet instantly raised herself in the chair and snatched the
photograph off the easel. She laid the portrait face downward, among
some papers on the table, then abruptly changed her mind, and hid it
among the thick folds of lace which clothed her neck and bosom. There
was a world of love in the action itself, and in the sudden softening of
the eyes which accompanied it. The next moment Lady Janet's mask was on.
Any superficial observer who had seen her now would have said