"Wilkie Collins - The New Magdalen" - читать интересную книгу автора (Collins Wilkie)

"Surely you know!" exclaimed Lady Janet.
"Indeed I don't. Tell me why."
"Ask Horace to tell you."
The last allusion was too plain to be misunderstood. Mercy's head drooped. She
began to tremble again. Lady Janet looked at her in blank amazement.
"Is there anything wrong between Horace and you?" she asked.
"No."
"You know your own heart, my dear child? You have surely not encouraged Horace
without loving him?"
"Oh no!"
"And yet--"
For the first time in their experience of each other Mercy ventured to interrupt
her benefactress. "Dear Lady Janet," she interposed, gently, "I am in no hurry
to be married. There will be plenty of time in the future to talk of that. You
had something you wished to say to me. What is it?"
It was no easy matter to disconcert Lady Janet Roy. But that last question
fairly reduced her to silence. After all that had passed, there sat her young
companion, innocent of the faintest suspicion of the subject that was to be
discussed between them! "What are the young women of the present time made of?"
thought the old lady, utterly at a loss to know what to say next. Mercy waited,
on her side, with an impenetrable patience which only aggravated the
difficulties of the position. The silence was fast threatening to bring the
interview to a sudden and untimely end, when the door from the library opened,
and a man-servant, bearing a little silver salver, entered the room.
Lady Janet's rising sense of annoyance instantly seized on the servant as a
victim. "What do you want?" she asked, sharply. "I never rang for you."
"A letter, my lady. The messenger waits for an answer."
The man presented his salver with the letter on it, and withdrew.
Lady Janet recognized the handwriting on the address with a look of surprise.
"Excuse me, my dear," she said, pausing, with her old-fashioned courtesy, before
she opened the envelope. Mercy made the necessary acknowledgment, and moved away
to the other end of the room, little thinking that the arrival of the letter
marked a crisis in her life. Lady Janet put on her spectacles. "Odd that he
should have come back already!" she said to herself, as she threw the empty
envelope on the table.
The letter contained these lines, the writer of them being no other than the man
who had preached in the chapel of the Refuge:
"DEAR AUNT--I am back again in London before my time. My friend the rector has
shortened his holiday, and has resumed his duties in the country. I am afraid
you will blame me when you hear of the reasons which have hastened his return.
The sooner I make my confession, the easier I shall feel. Besides, I have a
special object in wishing to see you as soon as possible. May I follow my letter
to Mablethorpe House? And may I present a lady to you--a perfect stranger--in
whom I am interested? Pray say Yes, by the bearer, and oblige your affectionate
nephew,
"JULIAN GRAY."
Lady Janet referred again suspiciously to the sentence in the letter which
alluded to the "lady."
Julian Gray was her only surviving nephew, the son of a favorite sister whom she
had lost. He would have held no very exalted position in the estimation of his