"Don't, auntie! Don't say it! Yes, yes, he was taken to the hospital, and died of his injuries. But don't speak of his terrible mutilations. I--I can't bear it."
Again Joan buried her face in her hands as though to shut out the horror of it all. But the elder woman had no such scruples.
"Why harrow yourself with the picture?" she demanded brusquely. "Imagination can add nothing to the fact. Tears will not change one detail. They will only add to your distress. Dick Sorley left your side to go to certain death. Nothing could have averted that. Such was his fate--through you."
Joan suddenly threw up her head. There was resentment in the violet depths of her eyes, and her whole expression had hardened. It was as though something of her youth, her softness, had passed from her.
"You must tell me, auntie," she demanded in a tone as cold as the other's. "I--I don't understand. But I mean to. You accuse me with the responsibility of--this. Of responsibility for all that has happened to those others. You tell me I am cursed. It is all too much--or too little. Now I demand to know that which you know--all that there is to know. It is my right. I never knew my father or mother, and you have told me little enough of them. Well, I insist that you shall tell me the right by which you dare to say such things to me. I know you are cruel, that you have no sympathy for any one but--yourself. I know that you grudge the world every moment of happiness that life contains. Well, all this I try to account for by crediting you with having passed through troubles of which I have no knowledge. But it does not give you the right to charge me with the things you do. You shall tell me now the reason of your accusations, or I will leave this home forever, and will never, of my own free will, set eyes on you again."
Mercy's thin lips parted into a half-smile.
"And I intend that you shall know these things," she replied promptly. "You shall know them from my lips. Nor has any one more right to the telling than I." The smile died abruptly, leaving her burning eyes shining in an icy setting. "I am cruel, eh?" she went on intensely. "Cruel because I have refused to bend beneath the injustice of my fellows and the persecutions of Fate. Cruel because I meet the world in the spirit in which it has received me. Why should I have sympathy? The world has robbed me of the only happiness I ever desired. What obligation, then, is mine? You are right. I have no sympathy for any living creature--none!"