But there was no shrinking in her now from the ordeal of the confession.
She was not only anxious—she was impatient for Julian's return.
Before she slept that night Julian's confidence in her should be a confidence that she had deserved.
"Let her own the truth, without the base fear of discovery to drive her to it.
Let her do justice to the woman whom she has wronged, while that woman is still powerless to expose her.
Let her sacrifice everything that she has gained by the fraud to the sacred duty of atonement.
If she can do that, then her repentance has nobly revealed the noble nature that is in her; then she is a woman to be trusted, respected, beloved."
Those words were as vividly present to her as if she still heard them falling from his lips.
Those other words which had followed them rang as grandly as ever in her ears:
"Rise, poor wounded heart!
Beautiful, purified soul, God's angels rejoice over you!
Take your place among the noblest of God's creatures!" Did the woman live who could hear Julian Gray say that, and who could hesitate, at any sacrifice, at any loss, to justify his belief in her?
"Oh!" she thought, longingly while her eyes followed Lady Janet to the end of the library, "if your worst fears could only be realized!
If I could only see Grace Roseberry in this room, how fearlessly I could meet her now!"
She closed the library door, while Lady Janet opened the other door which led into the hall.
As she turned and looked back into the dining-room a cry of astonishment escaped her.
There—as if in answer to the aspiration which was still in her mind; there, established in triumph on the chair that she had just left—sat Grace Roseberry, in sinister silence, waiting for her.
CHAPTER XIX. THE EVIL GENIUS.
RECOVERING from the first overpowering sensation of surprise, Mercy rapidly advanced, eager to say her first penitent 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 instinctively 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 worthy 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 complexion, 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, standing erect in her rich silken dress; her tall, shapely figure towering over the little creature before her; her grand head bent in graceful submission; 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 inevitably, if it had been left to him to guess which was which, have picked out Grace as the counterfeit and Mercy as the true woman.
Grace broke the silence.
She had waited to open her lips until she had eyed her conquered victim all over, with disdainfully minute attention, from head to foot.
"Stand there.
I like to look at you," she said, speaking with a spiteful relish of her own cruel words.
"It's no use fainting this time.
You have not got Lady Janet Roy to bring you to. There are no gentlemen here to-day to pity you and pick you up.
Mercy Merrick, I have got you at last.
Thank God, my turn has come!
You can't escape me now!"
All the littleness of heart and mind which had first shown itself in Grace at the meeting in the cottage, when Mercy told the sad story of her life, now revealed itself once more.
The woman who in those past times had felt no impulse to take a suffering and a penitent fellow-creature by the hand was the same woman who could feel no pity, who could spare no insolence of triumph, now.
Mercy's sweet voice answered her patiently, in low, pleading tones.
"I have not avoided you," she said. "I would have gone to you of my own accord if I had known that you were here.