RECOVERING from the first overpowering sensation of surprise, Mercy rapidly advanced, eager to say her first penitent¹ words. Grace stopped her by a warning gesture of the hand. “No nearer to me,” she said, with a look of contemptuous command. “Stay where you are.”

Mercy paused. Grace’s reception had startled her. She instinctively² took the chair nearest to her to support herself. Grace raised a warning hand for the second time, and issued another command: “I forbid you to be seated in my presence. You have no right to be in this house at all. Remember, if you please, who you are, and who I am.”

The tone in which those words were spoken was an insult in itself. Mercy suddenly lifted her head; the angry answer was on her lips. She checked it, and submitted in silence. “I will be worthy⁴ of Julian Gray’s confidence in me,” she thought, as she stood patiently by the chair. “I will bear anything from the woman whom I have wronged.”

In silence the two faced each other; alone together, for the first time since they had met in the French cottage. The contrast between them was strange to see. Grace Roseberry, seated in her chair, little and lean, with her dull white complexion⁵, with her hard, threatening face, with her shrunken figure clad in its plain and poor black garments, looked like a being of a lower sphere, compared with Mercy Merrick, standing⁶ erect⁷ in her rich silken dress; her tall, shapely figure towering over the little creature before her; her grand head bent⁸ in graceful⁹ submission¹⁰; gentle, patient, beautiful; a woman whom it was a privilege to look at and a distinction to admire. If a stranger had been told that those two had played their parts in a romance of real life — that one of them was really connected by the ties of relationship with Lady Janet Roy, and that the other had successfully attempted to personate her — he would

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