She turned on him angrily before he could finish the sentence.
"You have tried to make her hurry me into marrying you," she burst out.
"I see it in your face!"
Plain as the warning was this time, Horace still failed to interpret it in the right way.
"Don't be angry!" he said, good-humoredly. "Is it so very inexcusable to ask Lady Janet to intercede for me?
I have tried to persuade you in vain.
My mother and my sisters have pleaded for me, and you turn a deaf ear—"
She could endure it no longer.
She stamped her foot on the door with hysterical vehemence.
"I am weary of hearing of your mother and your sisters!" she broke in violently.
"You talk of nothing else."
It was just possible to make one more mistake in dealing with her—and Horace made it.
He took offense, on his side, and rose from the sofa.
His mother and sisters were high authorities in his estimation; they variously represented his ideal of perfection in women.
He withdrew to the opposite extremity of the room, and administered the severest reproof that he could think of on the spur of the moment.
"It would be well, Grace, if you followed the example set you by my mother and my sisters," he said.
"They are not in the habit of speaking cruelly to those who love them."
To all appearance the rebuke failed to produce the slightest effect.
She seemed to be as indifferent to it as if it had not reached her ears.
There was a spirit in her—a miserable spirit, born of her own bitter experience—which rose in revolt against Horace's habitual glorification of the ladies of his family.
"It sickens me," she thought to herself, "to hear of the virtues of women who have never been tempted!
Where is the merit of living reputably, when your life is one course of prosperity and enjoyment?
Has his mother known starvation?
Have his sisters been left forsaken in the street?"
It hardened her heart—it almost reconciled her to deceiving him—when he set his relatives up as patterns for her.
Would he never understand that women detested having other women exhibited as examples to them?
She looked round at him with a sense of impatient wonder.
He was sitting at the luncheon-table, with his back turned on her, and his head resting on his hand. If he had attempted to rejoin her, she would have repelled him; if he had spoken, she would have met him with a sharp reply. He sat apart from her, without uttering a word.
In a man's hands silence is the most terrible of all protests to the woman who loves him.
Violence she can endure.
Words she is always ready to meet by words on her side.
Silence conquers her.
After a moment's hesitation, Mercy left the sofa and advanced submissively toward the table.
She had offended him—and she alone was in fault.
How should he know it, poor fellow, when he innocently mortified her?
Step by step she drew closer and closer.
He never looked round; he never moved.
She laid her hand timidly on his shoulder.
"Forgive me, Horace," she whispered in his ear. "I am suffering this morning; I am not myself.
I didn't mean what I said.
Pray forgive me."
There was no resisting the caressing tenderness of voice and manner which accompanied those words.
He looked up; he took her hand.
She bent over him, and touched his forehead with her lips.
"Am I forgiven?" she asked.
"Oh, my darling," he said, "if you only knew how I loved you!"
"I do know it," she answered, gently, twining his hair round her finger, and arranging it over his forehead where his hand had ruffled it.
They were completely absorbed in each other, or they must, at that moment, have heard the library door open at the other end of the room.
Lady Janet had written the necessary reply to her nephew, and had returned, faithful to her engagement, to plead the cause of Horace.
The first object that met her view was her client pleading, with conspicuous success, for himself!