The sense of her degradation had never been so bitterly present to her as at that moment.
If she could only confess the truth—if she could innocently enjoy her harmless life at Mablethorpe House—what a grateful, happy woman she might be!
Was it possible (if she made the confession) to trust to her own good conduct to plead her excuse?
No!
Her calmer sense warned her that it was hopeless.
The place she had won—honestly won—in Lady Janet's estimation had been obtained by a trick.
Nothing could alter, nothing could excuse, that.
She took out her handkerchief and dashed away the useless tears that had gathered in her eyes, and tried to turn her thoughts some other way.
What was it Lady Janet had said on going into the library?
She had said she was coming back to speak about Horace.
Mercy guessed what the object was; she knew but too well what Horace wanted of her.
How was she to meet the emergency?
In the name of Heaven, what was to be done?
Could she let the man who loved her—the man whom she loved—drift blindfold into marriage with such a woman as she had been?
No! it was her duty to warn him.
How?
Could she break his heart, could she lay his life waste by speaking the cruel words which might part them forever?
"I can't tell him!
I won't tell him!" she burst out, passionately. "The disgrace of it would kill me!"
Her varying mood changed as the words escaped her.
A reckless defiance of her own better nature—that saddest of all the forms in which a woman's misery can express itself—filled her heart with its poisoning bitterness.
She sat down again on the sofa with eyes that glittered and cheeks suffused with an angry red.
"I am no worse than another woman!" she thought. "Another woman might have married him for his money."
The next moment the miserable insufficiency of her own excuse for deceiving him showed its hollowness, self-exposed.
She covered her face with her hands, and found refuge—where she had often found refuge before—in the helpless resignation of despair.
"Oh, that I had died before I entered this house!
Oh, that I could die and have done with it at this moment!"
So the struggle had ended with her hundreds of times already.
So it ended now.
The door leading into the billiard-room opened softly.
Horace Holmcroft had waited to hear the result of Lady Janet's interference in his favor until he could wait no longer.
He looked in cautiously, ready to withdraw again unnoticed if the two were still talking together.
The absence of Lady Janet suggested that the interview had come to an end.
Was his betrothed wife waiting alone to speak to him on his return to the room?
He advanced a few steps.
She never moved; she sat heedless, absorbed in her thoughts.
Were they thoughts of him?
He advanced a little nearer, and called to her.
"Grace!"
She sprang to her feet, with a faint cry.
"I wish you wouldn't startle me," she said, irritably, sinking back on the sofa.
"Any sudden alarm sets my heart beating as if it would choke me."
Horace pleaded for pardon with a lover's humility.
In her present state of nervous irritation she was not to be appeased.
She looked away from him in silence.
Entirely ignorant of the paroxysm of mental suffering through which she had just passed, he seated himself by her side, and asked her gently if she had seen Lady Janet.
She made an affirmative answer with an unreasonable impatience of tone and manner which would have warned an older and more experienced man to give her time before he spoke again.
Horace was young, and weary of the suspense that he had endured in the other room.
He unwisely pressed her with another question.
"Has Lady Janet said anything to you—"