Once
more she thought of the chance which Miss Roseberry had lost.
Unhappy creature! what a home would have been open to her if the
shell had only fallen on the side of the window, instead of on
the side of the yard!
Mercy pushed the letter away from her, and walked impatiently to
and fro in the room.
The perversity in her thoughts was not to be mastered in that
way. Her mind only abandoned one useless train of reflection to
occupy itself with another. She was now looking by anticipation
at her own future. What were her prospects (if she lived through
it) when the war was over? The experience of the past delineated
with pitiless fidelity the dreary scene. Go where she might, do
what she might, it would always end in the same way. Curiosity
and admiration excited by her beauty; inquiries made about her;
the story of the past discovered; Society charitably sorry for
her; Society generously subscribing for her; and still, through
all the years of her life, the same result in the end--the shadow
of the old disgrace surrounding her as with a pestilence,
isolating her among other women, branding her, even when she had
earned her pardon in the sight of God, with the mark of an
indelible disgrace in the sight of man: there was the prospect!
And she was only five-and-twenty last birthday; she was in the
prime of her health and her strength; she might live, in the
course of nature, fifty years more!
She stopped again at the bedside; she looked again at the face of
the corpse.
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