courage enough to wait for events in a room by herself? Julian had yet to learn that a woman's courage rises with the greatness of the emergency. Ask her to accompany you through a field in which some harmless cattle happen to be grazing, and it is doubtful, in nine cases out of ten, if she will do it. Ask her, as one of the passengers in a ship on fire, to help in setting an example of composure to the rest, and it is certain, in nine cases out of ten, that she will do it. As soon as Julian had taken a chair near her, Mercy was calm again.
'Are you sure of your resolution?' he asked.
'I am certain of it,' she answered, 'as long as you don't leave me by myself.'
The talk between them dropped there. They sat together in silence, with their eyes fixed on the door, waiting for Horace to come in.
After the lapse of a few minutes their attention was attracted by a sound outside in the grounds. A carriage of some sort was plainly audible approaching the house.
The carriage stopped; the bell rang; the front door was opened. Had a visitor arrived? No voice could be heard making inquiries. No footsteps but the servant's footsteps crossed the hall. Along pause followed, the carriage remaining at the door. Instead of bringing some one to the house, it had apparently arrived to take some one away.
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
'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.
