The message inside was expressed in these terms: “I am as deeply interested in her as you are. Say that I have received her letter, and that I welcome her back to the Refuge with all my heart. I have business this evening in the neighborhood. I will call for her myself at Mablethorpe House.” The message explained itself. Of her own free-will she had made the expiation complete! Of her own free-will she was going back to the martyrdom of her old life! Bound as he knew himself to be to let no compromising word or action escape him in the presence of Horace, the irrepressible expression of Julian’s admiration glowed in his eyes as they rested on Mercy. Horace detected the look. He sprang forward and tried to snatch the telegram out of Julian’s hand. “Give it to me!” he said. “I will have it!” Julian silently put him back at arms-length. Maddened with rage, he lifted his hand threateningly. “Give it to me!” he repeated between his set teeth, “or it will be the worse for you!” “Give it to _me!_” said Mercy, suddenly placing herself between them. Julian gave it. She turned, and offered it to Horace, looking at him with a steady eye, holding it out to him with a steady hand. “Read it,” she said. Julian’s generous nature pitied the man who had insulted him. Julian’s great heart only remembered the friend of former times. “Spare him!” he said to Mercy. “Remember he is unprepared.” She neither answered nor moved. Nothing stirred the horrible torpor of her resignation to her fate. She knew that the time had come. Julian appealed to Horace. “Don’t read it!” he cried. “Hear what she has to say to you first!” Horace’s hand answered him with a contemptuous gesture. Horace’s eyes devoured, word by word, the Matron’s message. He looked up when he had read it through. There was a ghastly change in his face as he turned it on Mercy. She stood between the two men like a statue. The life in her seemed to have died out, except in her eyes. Her eyes rested on Horace with a steady, glittering calmness. The silence was only broken by the low murmuring of Julian’s voice. His face was hidden in his hands--he was praying for them. Horace spoke, laying his finger on the telegram. His voice had changed with the change in his face. The tone was low and trembling: no one would have recognized it as the tone of Horace’s voice. “What does this mean?” he said to Mercy. “It can’t be for you?” “It _is_ for me.” “What have You to do with a Refuge?” Without a change in her face, without a movement in her limbs, she spoke the fatal words: “I have come from a Refuge, and I am going back to a Refuge. Mr. Horace Holmcroft, I am Mercy Merrick.” CHAPTER XXVI. GREAT HEART AND LITTLE HEART. THERE was a pause.