“Justice!” she cried, shaking her clinched hand with hysterical frenzy in the air. “I claim my right to meet that woman face to face! Where is she? Confront me with her! Confront me with her!”
While those wild words were pouring from her lips, the rumbling of carriage wheels became audible on the drive in front of the house. In the all-absorbing agitation of the moment, the sound of the wheels (followed by the opening of the house door) passed unnoticed by the persons in the dining-room. Horace’s voice was still raised in angry protest against the insult offered to Lady Janet; Lady Janet herself (leaving him for the second time) was vehemently ringing the bell to summon the servants; Julian had once more taken the infuriated woman by the arms and was trying vainly to compose her—when the library door was opened quietly by a young lady wearing a mantle and a bonnet. Mercy Merrick (true to the appointment which she had made with Horace) entered the room.
The first eyes that discovered her presence on the scene were the eyes of Grace Roseberry. Starting violently in Julian’s grasp, she pointed toward the library door. “Ah!” she cried, with a shriek of vindictive delight. “There she is!”
Mercy turned as the sound of the scream rang through the room, and met—resting on her in savage triumph—the living gaze of the woman whose identity she had stolen, whose body she had left laid out for dead. On the instant of that terrible discovery—with her eyes fixed helplessly on the fierce eyes that had found her—she dropped senseless on the floor.
CHAPTER XII. EXIT JULIAN.
JULIAN happened to be standing nearest to Mercy. He was the first at her side when she fell.
In the cry of alarm which burst from him, as he raised her for a moment in his arms, in the expression of his eyes when he looked at her death-like face, there escaped the plain—too plain—confession of the interest which he felt in her, of the admiration which she had aroused in him. Horace detected it. There was the quick suspicion of jealousy in the movement by which he joined Julian; there was the ready resentment of jealousy in the tone in which he pronounced the words, “Leave her to me.” Julian resigned her in silence. A faint flush appeared on his pale face as he drew back while Horace carried her to the sofa. His eyes sunk to the ground; he seemed to be meditating self-reproachfully on the tone in which his friend had spoken to him. After having been the first to take an active part in meeting the calamity that had happened, he was now, to all appearance, insensible to everything that was passing in the room.
A touch on his shoulder roused him.
He turned and looked round. The woman who had done the mischief—the stranger in the poor black garments—was standing behind him. She pointed to the prostrate figure on the sofa, with a merciless smile.