He had mastered his temper at last: he spoke with dignity, and he spoke
to the point. His position was unassailable; he claimed nothing but his
right.
"My choice was made," Mercy answered, "when I gave you my promise
upstairs."
She waited a little, struggling to control herself on the brink of the
terrible revelation that was coming. Her eyes dropped before his;
her heart beat faster and faster; but she struggled bravely. With a
desperate courage she faced the position. "If you are ready to listen,"
she went on, "I am ready to tell you why I insisted on having the police
officer sent out of the house."
Horace held up his hand warningly.
"Stop!" he said; "that is not all."
His infatuated jealousy of Julian (fatally misinterpreting her
agitation) distrusted her at the very outset. She had limited herself
to clearing up the one question of her interference with the officer
of justice. The other question of her relations with Julian she had
deliberately passed over. Horace instantly drew his own ungenerous
conclusion.
"Let us not misunderstand one another," he said. "The explanation of
your conduct in the other room is only one of the explanations which
you owe me. You have something else to account for. Let us begin with
_that_, if you please."
She looked at him in unaffected surprise.
"What else have I to account for?" she asked.
He again repeated his reply to Lady Janet.
"I have told you already," he said. "I don't understand your
confidential relations with Julian Gray."
Mercy's color rose; Mercy's eyes began to brighten.
"Don't return to that!" she cried, with an irrepressible outbreak of
disgust. "Don't, for God's sake, make me despise you at such a moment as
this!"
His obstinacy only gathered fresh encouragement from that appeal to his
better sense.
"I insist on returning to it."
She had resolved to bear anything from him--as her fit punishment for
the deception of which she had been guilty. But it was not in womanhood
(at the moment when the first words of her confession were trembling on
her lips) to endure Horace's unworthy suspicion of her. She rose from
her seat and met his eye firmly.
"I refuse to degrade myself, and to degrade Mr. Julian Gray, by
answering you," she said.
"Consider what you are doing," he rejoined. "Change your mind, before it
is too late!"
"You have had my reply."
Those resolute words, that steady resistance, seemed to infuriate him.
He caught her roughly by the arm.
"You are as false as hell!" he cried. "It's all over between you and
me!"
The loud threatening tone in which he had spoken penetrated through
the closed door of the dining-room. The door instantly opened. Julian
returned to the library.
He had just set foot in the room, when there was a knock at the
other door--the door that opened on the hall. One of the men-servants
appeared, with a telegraphic message in his hand. Mercy was the first to
see it. It was the Matron's answer to the letter which she had sent to
the Refuge.