ch Miss Roseberry had lost. Unhappy creature! what a home
would have been open to her if the shell had only fallen on the side of
the window, instead of on the side of the yard!

Mercy pushed the letter away from her, and walked impatiently to and fro
in the room.

The perversity in her thoughts was not to be mastered in that way. Her
mind only abandoned one useless train of reflection to occupy itself
with another. She was now looking by anticipation at her own future.
What were her prospects (if she lived through it) when the war was over?
The experience of the past delineated with pitiless fidelity the dreary
scene. Go where she might, do what she might, it would always end in the
same way. Curiosity and admiration excited by her beauty; inquiries made
about her; the story of the past discovered; Society charitably sorry
for her; Society generously subscribing for her; and still, through all
the years of her life, the same result in the end--the shadow of the old
disgrace surrounding her as with a pestilence, isolating her among other
women, branding her, even when she had earned her pardon in the sight of
God, with the mark of an indelible disgrace in the sight of man: there
was the prospect! And she was only five-and-twenty last birthday; she
was in the prime of her health and her strength; she might live, in the
course of nature, fifty years more!

She stopped again at the bedside; she looked again at the face of the
corpse.

To what end had the shell struck the woman who had some hope in her
life, and spared the woman who had none? The words she had herself
spoken to Grace Roseberry came back to her as she thought of it. "If I
only had your chance! If I only had your reputation and your prospects!"
And there was the chance wasted! there were the enviable prospects
thrown away! It was almost maddening to contemplate that result, feeling
her own position as she felt it. In the bitter mockery of despair she
bent over the lifeless figure, and spoke to it as if it had ears to hear
her. "Oh!" she said, longingly, "if you could be Mercy Merrick, and if I
could be Grace Roseberry, _now!_"

The instant the words passed her lips she started into an erect
position. She stood by the bed with her eyes staring wildly into empty
space; with her brain in a flame; with her heart beating as if it would
stifle her. "If you could be Mercy Merrick, and if I could be Grace
Roseberry, now!" In one breathless moment the thought ass