dy
Janet's eyes discovered something supremely interesting in the familiar
objects that surrounded her on the library walls.

How were these changes to be interpreted? To what possible conclusion
did they point?

Julian's profounder knowledge of human nature, if Julian had been
present, might have found a clew to the mystery. _He_ might have
surmised (incredible as it was) that Mercy's timidity before Lady Janet
was fully reciprocated by Lady Janet's timidity before Mercy. It
was even so. The woman whose immovable composure had conquered Grace
Roseberry's utmost insolence in the hour of her triumph--the woman
who, without once flinching, had faced every other consequence of her
resolution to ignore Mercy's true position in the house--quailed for the
first time when she found herself face to face with the very person for
who m she had suffered and sacrificed so much. She had shrunk from the
meeting with Mercy, as Mercy had shrunk from the meeting with _her_. The
splendor of her dress meant simply that, when other excuses for delaying
the meeting downstairs had all been exhausted, the excuse of a long,
and elaborate toilet had been tried next. Even the moments occupied in
reprimanding the servant had been moments seized on as the pretext for
another delay. The hasty entrance into the room, the nervous assumption
of playfulness in language and manner, the evasive and wandering eyes,
were all referable to the same cause. In the presence of others, Lady
Janet had successfully silenced the protest of her own inbred delicacy
and inbred sense of honor. In the presence of Mercy, whom she loved with
a mother's love--in the presence of Mercy, for whom she had stooped to
deliberate concealment of the truth--all that was high and noble in the
woman's nature rose in her and rebuked her. What will the daughter of
my adoption, the child of my first and last experience of maternal love,
think of me, now that I have made myself an accomplice in the fraud of
which she is ashamed? How can I look her in the face, when I have not
hesitated, out of selfish consideration for my own tranquillity, to
forbid that frank avowal of the truth which her finer sense of duty had
spontaneously bound her to make? Those were the torturing questions in
Lady Janet's mind, while her arm was wound affectionately round Mercy's
waist, while her fingers were busying themselves familiarly with the
arrangement of Mercy's hair. Thence, and thence only, sprang the i