“I will make myself understood. You asked me if I knew your name. I ask you, in return, which name it is? The name on your card is ‘Miss Roseberry.’ The name marked on your clothes, when you were in the hospital, was ‘Mercy Merrick.’”
The self-possession which Grace had maintained from the moment when she had entered the dining-room, seemed now, for the first time, to be on the point of failing her. She turned, and looked appealingly at Julian, who had thus far kept his place apart, listening attentively.
“Surely,” she said, “your friend, the consul, has told you in his letter about the mark on the clothes?”
Something of the girlish hesitation and timidity which had marked her demeanor at her interview with Mercy in the French cottage re-appeared in her tone and manner as she spoke those words. The changes—mostly changes for the worse—wrought in her by the suffering through which she had passed since that time were now (for the moment) effaced. All that was left of the better and simpler side of her character asserted itself in her brief appeal to Julian. She had hitherto repelled him. He began to feel a certain compassionate interest in her now.
“The consul has informed me of what you said to him,” he answered, kindly. “But, if you will take my advice, I recommend you to tell your story to Lady Janet in your own words.”
Grace again addressed herself with submissive reluctance to Lady Janet.
“The clothes your ladyship speaks of,” she said, “were the clothes of another woman. The rain was pouring when the soldiers detained me on the frontier. I had been exposed for hours to the weather—I was wet to the skin. The clothes marked ‘Mercy Merrick’ were the clothes lent to me by Mercy Merrick herself while my own things were drying. I was struck by the shell in those clothes. I was carried away insensible in those clothes after the operation had been performed on me.”
Lady Janet listened to perfection—and did no more. She turned confidentially to Horace, and said to him, in her gracefully ironical way: “She is ready with her explanation.”
Horace answered in the same tone: “A great deal too ready.”
Grace looked from one of them to the other. A faint flush of color showed itself in her face for the first time.