The Footstep in the Corridor

She locked her door and opened her writing-desk. Knowing what she had to
do, she tried to collect herself and do it.

The effort was in vain. Those persons who study writing as an art
are probably the only persons who can measure the vast distance which
separates a conception as it exists in the mind from the reduction
of that conception to form and shape in words. The heavy stress of
agitation that had been laid on Mercy for hours together had utterly
unfitted her for the delicate and difficult process of arranging the
events of a narrative in their due sequence and their due proportion
toward each other. Again and again she tried to begin her letter, and
again and again she was baffled by the same hopeless confusion of ideas.
She gave up the struggle in despair.

A sense of sinking at her heart, a weight of hysterical oppression on
her bosom, warned her not to leave herself unoccupied, a prey to morbid
self-investigation and imaginary alarms.

She turned instinctively, for a temporary employment of some kind, to
the consideration of her own future. Here there were no intricacies
or entanglements. The prospect began and ended with her return to the
Refuge, if the matron would receive her. She did no injustice to Julian
Gray; that great heart would feel for her, that kind hand would be
held out to her, she knew. But what would happen if she thoughtlessly
accepted all that his sympathy might offer? Scandal would point to her
beauty and to his youth, and would place its own vile interpretation on
the purest friendship that could exist between them. And _he_ would
be the sufferer, for _he_ had a character--a clergyman's character--to
lose. No. For his sake, out of gratitude to _him_, the farewell to
Mablethorpe House must be also the farewell to Julian Gray.