The next event was the return of the servant to the front door.
They listened again.
Again no second footstep was audible.
The door was closed; the servant recrossed the hall; the carriage was driven away.
Judging by sounds alone, no one had arrived at the house, and no one had left the house.
Julian looked at Mercy.
"Do you understand this?" he asked.
She silently shook her head.
"If any person has gone away in the carriage," Julian went on, "that person can hardly have been a man, or we must have heard him in the hall."
The conclusion which her companion had just drawn from the noiseless departure of the supposed visitor raised a sudden doubt in Mercy's mind.
"Go and inquire!" she said, eagerly.
Julian left the room, and returned again, after a brief absence, with signs of grave anxiety in his face and manner.
"I told you I dreaded the most trifling events that were passing about us," he said. "An event, which is far from being trifling, has just happened.
The carriage which we heard approaching along the drive turns out to have been a cab sent for from the house.
The person who has gone away in it—"
"Is a woman, as you supposed?"
"Yes."
Mercy rose excitedly from her chair.
"It can't be Grace Roseberry?" she exclaimed.
"It is Grace Roseberry."
"Has she gone away alone?"
"Alone—after an interview with Lady Janet."
"Did she go willingly?"
"She herself sent the servant for the cab."
"What does it mean?"
"It is useless to inquire.
We shall soon know."
They resumed their seats, waiting, as they had waited already, with their eyes on the library door.
CHAPTER XXIII. LADY JANET AT BAY.
THE narrative leaves Julian and Mercy for a while, and, ascending to the upper regions of the house, follows the march of events in Lady Janet's room.
The maid had delivered her mistress's note to Mercy, and had gone away again on her second errand to Grace Roseberry in her boudoir.
Lady Janet was seated at her writing-table, waiting for the appearance of the woman whom she had summoned to her presence.
A single lamp diffused its mild light over the books, pictures, and busts round her, leaving the further end of the room, in which the bed was placed, almost lost in obscurity.
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.