She neither answered nor moved.
Nothing stirred the horrible torpor of her resignation to her fate.
She knew that the time had come.
Julian appealed to Horace.
"Don't read it!" he cried.
"Hear what she has to say to you first!"
Horace's hand answered him with a contemptuous gesture.
Horace's eyes devoured, word by word, the Matron's message.
He looked up when he had read it through.
There was a ghastly change in his face as he turned it on Mercy.
She stood between the two men like a statue.
The life in her seemed to have died out, except in her eyes.
Her eyes rested on Horace with a steady, glittering calmness.
The silence was only broken by the low murmuring of Julian's voice.
His face was hidden in his hands—he was praying for them.
Horace spoke, laying his finger on the telegram.
His voice had changed with the change in his face.
The tone was low and trembling: no one would have recognized it as the tone of Horace's voice.
"What does this mean?" he said to Mercy.
"It can't be for you?"
"It is for me."
"What have You to do with a Refuge?"
Without a change in her face, without a movement in her limbs, she spoke the fatal words:
"I have come from a Refuge, and I am going back to a Refuge.
Mr. Horace Holmcroft, I am Mercy Merrick."
CHAPTER XXVI. GREAT HEART AND LITTLE HEART.
THERE was a pause.
The moments passed—and not one of the three moved.
The moments passed—and not one of the three spoke.
Insensibly the words of supplication died away on Julian's lips.
Even his energy failed to sustain him, tried as it now was by the crushing oppression of suspense.
The first trifling movement which suggested the idea of change, and which so brought with it the first vague sense of relief, came from Mercy.
Incapable of sustaining the prolonged effort of standing, she drew back a little and took a chair.
No outward manifestation of emotion escaped her.
There she sat—with the death-like torpor of resignation in her face—waiting her sentence in silence from the man at whom she had hurled the whole terrible confession of the truth in one sentence!
Julian lifted his head as she moved.
He looked at Horace, and advancing a few steps, looked again.
There was fear in his face, as he suddenly turned it toward Mercy.
"Speak to him!" he said, in a whisper.
"Rouse him, before it's too late!"
She moved mechanically in her chair; she looked mechanically at Julian.
"What more have I to say to him?" she asked, in faint, weary tones.
"Did I not tell him everything when I told him my name?"
The natural sound of her voice might have failed to affect Horace.
The altered sound of it roused him.
He approached Mercy's chair, with a dull surprise in his face, and put his hand, in a weak, wavering way, on her shoulder.
In that position he stood for a while, looking down at her in silence.
The one idea in him that found its way outward to expression was the idea of Julian.
Without moving his hand, without looking up from Mercy, he spoke for the first time since the shock had fallen on him.
"Where is Julian?" he asked, very quietly.