As it was now, suffering--sullen, silent,
self-contained suffering--had marred its beauty. Attention and
even curiosity it might still rouse. Admiration or interest it
could excite no longer.
The small, thin, black figure stood immovably inside the door.
The dull, worn, white face looked silently at the three persons
in the room.
The three persons in the room, on their side, stood for a moment
without moving, and looked silently at the stranger on the
threshold. There was something either in the woman herself, or in
the sudden and stealthy manner of her appearance in the room,
which froze, as if with the touch of an invisible cold hand, the
sympathies of all three. Accustomed to the world, habitually at
their ease in every social emergency, they were now silenced for
the first time in their lives by the first serious sense of
embarrassment which they had felt since they were children in the
presence of a stranger.
Had the appearance of the true Grace Roseberry aroused in their
minds a suspicion of the woman who had stolen her name, and taken
her place in the house?
Not so much as the shadow of a suspicion of Mercy was at the
bottom of the strange sense of uneasiness which had now deprived
them alike of their habitual courtesy and their habitual presence
of mind.
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