BUT retribution followed Camelia’s manoeuvre. On the advent of Mr. Rodrigg, very red and hot after a long country walk with Lord Haversham (who also had axes to grind), Perior said good-bye, remounted his horse, and rode off. It was six o’clock, a warmly rosy evening. The hot gold was gone, but in the sunset influences there was a certain oppression. Perior yawned and rode slowly along the strip of turf that bordered the dusty road. But though he felt physically very indolent, his mind was delightfully alert, weaving busily, with a sense of freedom and joyousness, a web of hopeful imaginings, swinging the illusive, intangible filaments from point to point of the afternoon’s experience. Nothing, in his estimation, could raise Camelia much above the level to which that cluster of frivolous lies had sunk her; his very heart ached when he thought of them—especially of the lie to Arthur; but the tears of last week, though his reason denied their influence, had in reality touched, surprised, and softened him, and made him hopeful. And now came the smiles, the sincerity, the sweetness of this afternoon; he could not distrust them. The idealist impulse—the master mood of his nature, though reined in so often by bitter experience, began to evolve an ell from the supposititious inch of excellence. The possibility of moral worth; the implication of some real rectitude of soul, that her truth to him seemed to justify; the formative power of a real affection for Arthur: so Perior wove his spider web, working as the spider does, from the merest foothold, and bridging chasms with a shining thread of trust.

Yet alas! for Camelia—that afternoon had certainly been a bungling piece of mismanagement, a covetous snatching at the present, a foolhardy forgetting of the future.

Perior met Mary returning in the dog-cart. He had not forgotten Mary, nor his suspicions of self-sacrifice. He turned his horse’s head again and proposed to ride back with her. Yes, he had plenty of time; and in assuring her of it he smiled his kindest smile, and the pony and the horse fell into a walk. The hours under the copper-beech, with Camelia’s white dress, and Camelia’s shining head to look at, had seemed delightfully cool and pleasant, yet the autumn afternoon had been a hot one, and Mary’s face was flushed, tired, and to her own knowledge, even a little tremulous.

“Did you have a nice afternoon?” he asked her.

“Oh, very, thanks,” the habit of submissive gratitude was too strong to be mastered at the first moment, though she added, “Camelia told you how sorry I was?”

“Yes, but I am still wounded. I did not think you would have deserted me for the babies of Copley.”

It was rather useless to attempt humor with Mary, for even he could interpret as alarmed and distressed the look of her face as it turned to him.

“Oh! but I did not want to go!” she exclaimed; “you know that! Camelia wished it—she had a headache, and said Mrs. Grier expected her, so, though I was quite ready for our ride, looking forward to it so much, I had to go; but I didn’t want to—indeed I was dreadfully disappointed—” And then suddenly the sense of injury, of resentment, of dismay at herself that she should wish to display that resentment—should wish to retaliate for humiliations too deep for display, getting altogether the better of her, two large tears—and Mary had been swallowing tears all the afternoon—rolled suddenly down her cheeks and splashed upon her dusty gloves.

“Why, Mary! Mary!” said Perior, aghast.

She searched for her handkerchief in hasty confusion. “How silly I am! I can’t help it; it has been so hot, I am so tired.”

“My poor child!” But Perior was more stricken than the sympathy of his tone made manifest. His pity sprang comprehendingly to Mary, but a deeper emotion underlay it. It was as if Mary had thrust that dusty dog-skin glove right through his beautiful, fragile spider web, and as he was dashed from his illusion his thoughts gathered themselves in quick bitter avengefulness.

“You were ready? dressed, you say?” he was already sure of Camelia’s falseness, but he wished to define it, to see just how much she had lied, to see just how far went her heartlessness.

“Yes,” Mary could not restrain the plaintive note, though she was drying her eyes in a sort of terror over her weakness.

“And Camelia forced you to go?”

“Oh, don’t think that!” Mary had thought it, but the words spoken by him shocked her. “She did not know how much I had set my heart on the ride, and it would have been a pity had Mrs. Grier been disappointed. That is what Camelia thought of—” and Mary quite believed Camelia as far as that went; but the cruel manner of discharging her duty! the deep injury of the forces brought to bear! The memory of them rose irrepressibly, poignantly.

“How considerate of Camelia!” Perior’s anger made any careful analysis of Camelia’s motives impossible. She had shirked an irksome duty, and kept him to entertain her laziness. The latter fact did not in the least mollify him; it was of a piece with her grasping selfishness, Mary’s pleasure not weighing a feather’s weight against the momentary wish. She had gone to “hurry” Mary, and on her return from the cousinly little errand, had given him the impression of Mary’s uninfluenced change of plan—even implying curates as its cause! Liar! The word almost choked him as he kept it down, for he did not want Mary to know her a liar.

“She went to your room to ask you to go?” he pursued, choosing a safe question.

But his persistence aroused in Mary a certain dim suspicion.

“Yes,” she said; “she was surprised to see me dressed. She did not know I was going with you.” The very force of her inner resentment—a hating resentment, as she felt with terror—made her grasp at an at least outward loyalty. But hardly had she spoken the words when the suspicion, definite, tingling with probability, leaped upon her. She looked quickly at Perior. He was white to the lips. This revelation fairly silenced him. He put his horse to the trot, and the dog-cart, hastening its pace, kept beside him.

Mary could hardly have spoken. Her mind was in a whirl of broken, distracted thoughts, that only grew to coherence when the wave-like conviction of Camelia’s mean robbery broke over her.

Perior’s scorning rage meanwhile hurried forward to wreak itself on Camelia; he was conscious only of its scorching.

They reached the park gates in silence; then Mary was able to say, “Are you coming in?”

“Yes, I will come in for a moment.”

“You—you won’t say anything about—my silliness?”

“My dear Mary, I must speak to Camelia; but you have accused her of nothing, nor shall she think you have. I will come for you to-morrow,” he added as he helped her down from the dog-cart at the door; “we will have our ride. Don’t be persuaded out of it either. Let other people do their own charities. It won’t harm them.”

Lady Paton was in the hall, a cool, gentle embodiment of the evening. “Mary brought you back?—You are going to dine, Michael?” she asked.

“No; I only want to see Camelia for a moment.”

“I have just come from her. She is with Mr. Rodrigg, talking politics,” and Lady Paton’s smile implied the softest pride in Camelia’s prowess in that pursuit. “She says you have had an old-time afternoon, reading together. You must take up your reading again, Michael—for the time that she is left to us.”

Mary, going slowly up the stairs, bent her head as she heard, “Yes: he had stayed with Camelia all the afternoon.” He did not care to ride with her—no, for all his kindness, the pleasure of the rides was poisoned forever. That was the thought that, at the sight of him, had cut her to the quick, bringing the tears to her eyes. More than Camelia’s lie, Camelia’s cruelty in dealing her that humiliation, burned. When she thought of it the blackness of her own heart terrified her. She felt that she hated Camelia, and when she reached her room, she bolted the door and fell on her bed in an agony of weeping.

Camelia perhaps counted a little too confidently upon Mary’s “adoration” for her. To Mary, Camelia had always seemed the bright personification of beauty, cleverness, joy. She had wondered at her, rather than admired her. Her attitude of mind had been as that of a child staring at the unattainable moon, shining silvery-gold, and sailing far above in a wide clear sky.

She had seldom been conscious in the past of any slight or injury. Her most constant feeling was one of quiet duty. Camelia’s little kindnesses surprised her; her unkindnesses she took as a matter of course. But now, in this dreadful clash of ill-matched interests, her life against Camelia’s game, all the sense of duty, of gratitude, of admiration, went down in black shipwreck. She found that they had been flimsy things, after all, that under their peaceful surface there had been for many weeks a lava-like heaving of resentment. And the worst terror was to see her life bereft of all supports—to see it unblessed, all hatred and despair. For even at the moment she could judge herself, measure how much she had lost in losing her blind humility—that at least gave calm and a certain self-respect—could accuse herself of injustice. Camelia had lied; but then Camelia could never have divined the rash folly of Mary’s secret—must never divine it; and the cruel humiliation of that one blighting intimation of Perior’s charity hurt more than the lie; and Camelia’s ignorance of the hurt she had inflicted only made it ache the more.