Mercy shrank from looking at him.

The signs of painful agitation began to show themselves in her shifting color and her uneasy silence.

Roused by Julian's significantly distant reference to what had passed between them, her better impulses were struggling already to recover their influence over her.

She might, at that critical moment, have yielded to the promptings of her own nobler nature--she might have risen superior to the galling remembrance of the insults that had been heaped upon her--if Grace's malice had not seen in her hesitation a means of referring offensively once again to her interview with Julian Gray.
"Pray don't think twice about trusting him alone with me," she said, with a sardonic affectation of politeness.

"_I_ am not interested in making a conquest of Mr.Julian Gray." The jealous distrust in Horace (already awakened by Julian's request) now attempted to assert itself openly.