“I want to know your opinion of the person who so terribly frightened me. Do you think her—”
“Do I think her—what?”
“Do you think her an adventuress?”
(As she said those words the branches of a shrub in the conservatory were noiselessly parted by a hand in a black glove. The face of Grace Roseberry appeared dimly behind the leaves. Undiscovered, she had escaped from the billiard-room, and had stolen her way into the conservatory as the safer hiding-place of the two. Behind the shrub she could see as well as listen. Behind the shrub she waited as patiently as ever.)
“I take a more merciful view,” Julian answered. “I believe she is acting under a delusion. I don’t blame her: I pity her.”
“You pity her?” As Mercy repeated the words, she tore off Julian’s hands the last few lengths of wool left, and threw the imperfectly wound skein back into the basket. “Does that mean,” she resumed, abruptly, “that you believe her?”
Julian rose from his seat, and looked at Mercy in astonishment.
“Good heavens, Miss Roseberry! what put such an idea as that into your head?”
“I am little better than a stranger to you,” she rejoined, with an effort to assume a jesting tone. “You met that person before you met with me. It is not so very far from pitying her to believing her. How could I feel sure that you might not suspect me?”
“Suspect you!” he exclaimed. “You don’t know how you distress, how you shock me. Suspect you! The bare idea of it never entered my mind. The man doesn’t live who trusts you more implicitly, who believes in you more devotedly, than I do.”