, "This is
a hard woman!"

The door was opened by the maid. Grace Roseberry entered the room.

She advanced rapidly, with a defiant assurance in her manner, and a
lofty carriage of her head. She sat down in the chair, to which Lady
Janet silently pointed, with a thump; she returned Lady Janet's grave
bow with a nod and a smile. Every movement and every look of the little,
worn, white-faced, shabbily dressed woman expressed insolent triumph,
and said, as if in words, "My turn has come!"

"I am glad to wait on your ladyship," she began, without giving Lady
Janet an opportunity of speaking first. "Indeed, I should have felt it
my duty to request an interview, if you had not sent your maid to invite
me up here."

"You would have felt it your duty to request an interview?" Lady Janet
repeated, very quietly. "Why?"

The tone in which that one last word was spoken embarrassed Grace at
the outset. It established as great a distance between Lady Janet and
herself as if she had been lifted in her chair and conveyed bodily to
the other end of the room.

"I am surprised that your ladyship should not understand me," she said,
struggling to conceal her confusion. "Especially after your kind offer
of your own boudoir."

Lady Janet remained perfectly unmoved. "I do _not_ understand you," she
answered, just as quietly as ever.

Grace's temper came to her assistance. She recovered the assurance which
had marked her first appearance on the scene.

"In that case," she resumed, "I must enter into particulars, in justice
to myself. I can place but one interpretation on the extraordinary
change in your ladyship's behavior to me downstairs. The conduct of that
abominable woman has at last opened your eyes to the deception that has
been practiced on you. For some reason of your own, however, you
have not yet chosen to recognize me openly. In this painful position
something is due to my own self-respect. I cannot, and will not, permit
Mercy Merrick to claim the merit of restoring me to my proper place in
this house. After what I have suffered it is quite impossible for me to
endure that. I should have requested an interview (if you had not sent
for me) for the express purpose of claiming this person's immediate
expulsion from the house. I claim it now as a proper concession to Me.
Whatever you or Mr. Julian Gray may do, _I_ will not tamely permit her
to exhibit herself as an interesting penitent. It is really a little too
much to hea