"I will stay with you, Horace, as long as you wish me to be here."
Having answered in those terms, he stopped as he passed Mercy, on his
way to the window. His quick and kindly insight told him that he might
still be of some service to her. A hint from him might show her the
shortest and the easiest way of making her confession. Delicately and
briefly he gave her the hint. "The first time I met you," he said, "I
saw that your life had had its troubles. Let us hear how those troubles
began."
He withdrew to his place in the recess. For the first time, since
the fatal evening when she and Grace Roseberry had met in the French
cottage, Mercy Merrick looked back into the purgatory on earth of her
past life, and told her sad story simply and truly in these words.