Her one chance of finding courage to crush him with the dreadful revelation of who she really was, of what she had really done, was to plunge headlong into the disclosure without giving herself time to think. The shame of it would overpower her if she gave herself time to think.
She turned to the door to follow him at once.
Even at that terrible moment the most ineradicable of all a woman’s instincts—the instinct of personal self-respect—brought her to a pause. She had passed through more than one terrible trial since she had dressed to go downstairs. Remembering this, she stopped mechanically, retraced her steps, and looked at herself in the glass.
There was no motive of vanity in what she now did. The action was as unconscious as if she had buttoned an unfastened glove, or shaken out a crumpled dress. Not the faintest idea crossed her mind of looking to see if her beauty might still plead for her, and of trying to set it off at its best.
A momentary smile, the most weary, the most hopeless, that ever saddened a woman’s face, appeared in the reflection which her mirror gave her back. “Haggard, ghastly, old before my time!” she said to herself. “Well! better so. He will feel it less—he will not regret me.”
With that thought she went downstairs to meet him in the library.
CHAPTER XXII. THE MAN IN THE DINING-ROOM.
IN the great emergencies of life we feel, or we act, as our dispositions incline us. But we never think. Mercy’s mind was a blank as she descended the stairs. On her way down she was conscious of nothing but the one headlong impulse to get to the library in the shortest possible space of time. Arrived at the door, the impulse capriciously left her. She stopped on the mat, wondering why she had hurried herself, with time to spare. Her heart sank; the fever of her excitement changed suddenly to a chill as she faced the closed door, and asked herself the question, Dare I go in?
Her own hand answered her. She lifted it to turn the handle of the lock. It dropped again helplessly at her side.