SHE did not see Mary again until the next morning, and then Camelia gave herself the satisfaction of fulfilling an uncompulsory duty. Mary’s mask-like look of endurance met her apology with a dumb confusion that Camelia must assume as accepting it, since she could not imagine Mary as unforgiving.

Holding Mary’s hand she repeated with some insistence, “I was devilish, indeed I was. I don’t know what evil spirit entered me.”

Mary was acute enough to see the apology as a mere poultice on Camelia’s bruised conscience, but she did not divine the stir of real pity that had prompted it, nor the embarrassment that concealed itself, half ashamed, under Camelia’s bright smile, a smile like the flourishing finality at the end of a conventional letter.

Mary only shrank more coweringly from the circling advance of pain. In her solitude Camelia’s whip-like words and Camelia’s smile blended to the same scorching; words, Mary thought, so true, that no apology, no smile, could efface them. That Camelia had felt them true was a nightmare suspicion; the instinct for the truth had at least been there, and, like the wounded animal, Mary quaked in her warren, conscious of insecurity. Camelia soon forgot both cruelty and apology.

The news of the defeat of the bill brought her no shock, when it came late in January. She had regretted keenly her own interference for a long time, and found herself prepared to meet the blow with the quiet of exhausted feeling. Camelia was not given in these days to finding excuses for her faults, but she could see that this one had been venial, and escape an unjust self-reproach. It was certainly irritating to have Mrs. Jedsley rub in the undeserved sting.

Coming from the library one afternoon Camelia found this lady ensconced before the drawing-room fire, her muddy boots outstretched to the blaze—Mrs. Jedsley’s boots were chronically muddy—a muffin in one hand, a cup of tea in the other, her expression divided among the triple pleasure of warmth, tea, and interesting news.

“Well, my dear, you’ve all had your brushes cut off, it seems,” was her consolatory greeting.

Camelia sank into a chair, languidly detesting Mrs. Jedsley’s bad taste.

“You did so much for the cause, too, didn’t you?” said Mrs. Jedsley, deterred by no delicate scruples. “Come, Camelia, confess that it has been a tumble for you all!”

“Too evident a tumble I think to require confession.”

“And Mr. Rodrigg here for such a time! You are less clever than I thought you—don’t be offended—I mean it in a complimentary sense. Then, after all, it isn’t a brush you need mind losing. I never thought much of the bill myself.”

Camelia sat coldly unresponsive, and Lady Paton tried to smile at Mrs. Jedsley’s remarks and to believe them purely humorous.

“I am sorry for poor Michael,” she said, “I fear he has taken it to heart.” This unconscious opening was only too gratefully seized upon by Mrs. Jedsley, who, after a meaning glance at Mary, fixed, over her tea-cup, sharp eyes on Camelia.

“Ah!” she said, “he is a man cut out for misfortunes—they all fit him. He is bound to fail in everything he undertakes.”

“I can’t agree with you there,” Camelia spoke acidly. “I think he succeeds at a great many things.”

“Things he doesn’t care about, then, you may be sure of that. Fortune follows such men like a stray dog they have no use for, while they are looking for their own lost pet.”

Camelia drank her tea in silence, priding herself somewhat on her forbearance, pondering, too, on the pathos of Mrs. Jedsley’s simile in which she could only see a purely personal applicability. It was not him the stray dog followed, but any number followed her—and it was she who had lost her all.

But would he not come back? Might she not see him again? To be with him—brave, self-controlled, and reticent, how well worth the fuller pain! Pain was so far preferable to these dragging mists where she waited. She might be—she must be—developing, but she must measure herself beside him to know just how much she had grown. It pleased her to see herself smiling sadly upon his unwitting kindness—for since he had thought it a folly he should think it now a folly outgrown. It pleased her to think that now exterior things mattered less to her than to him; he, for all his self-defence of calm, still winced under the whips of material circumstance; no doubt he was now tearing his heart out over the defeat of the bill, and trying to persuade himself that he had always expected it! She saw all material circumstance with Buddhistic indifference. This thought dwelt pleasantly while she drank her tea. Looking from the window she saw the winter afternoon not yet gray, and her contemplative mood impatient of the chiming sharp and mild which her mother and Mrs. Jedsley made, she left them to go out. First, though, she bent over her mother and kissed her. It gave her content to find tender demonstration becoming more and more an unforced habit.

“Nice, pretty little mamma,” she whispered.

In her long coat, Siegfried trotting in front of her, Camelia breasted the tonic January wind. There was just a crispness of snow on the ground; in the lanes thin patches of ice made walking wary. She emerged from the shelter of the hedges on to the fine billowy stretch of common, where the wind sang, and the sunset in the west made a wide red bar. Siegfried’s adventurous spirit soon warmed him to an energetic gallop through the dead fern and heather, and Camelia followed his lead, intending to cut across to the highroad, and by its long curve return home. It was in lifting her eyes to this road that she saw suddenly a distant figure walking along it at a quick pace that would bring them together at the very point she aimed for. It needed only the very first brush of a glance to tell her that it was Perior. For a moment joy and fear, courage and cowardice, pride and shame, struggled within her. Her step faltered, stopped even, and Siegfried stopping too, looked round at her, interrogation in the prick of his ears.

Camelia walked on slowly. Perior had seen and recognized her—that was evident. Whatever might be his own press of feeling he did not hesitate. He took off his cap and hailed her gaily, and Camelia felt that her answering hand-wave helped to prepare the way for a meeting most creditable to them both.

He did not fear the meeting, or would not show he did, for he advanced over the heather at a pace resolutely unembarrassed. In another moment they were face to face, and then she could see that his repressed a tremor, and was conscious that her own was, with the same attempt, a little rigid in its smile. Partly to recover from this shock of seeing her again, partly to give her time to recover from her own emotion, Perior raised her outstretched hand to his lips. He was so determined in his entrenched resistance to the lover he knew himself to be (the lover whose complaints had brought him rebelliously back again, his coming a sop angrily thrown at the uncontrollable gentleman on condition, that satisfied so far, he would keep still), so sure was Perior, the friend, of the bargain, that the kiss was most successfully friendly. It sealed delicately the bond he insisted on recognizing between himself and Camelia. His relief was great, in looking at her again, to see that she, too, fully recognized it, and that perhaps her courage was helped by the fact that the mood—the astonishing mood—had passed. It would much simplify matters if it had. He longed to be with her again, a longing her tacit acquiescence in the old friendship could alone justify him in satisfying. That his coming had not been indelicately ill-judged the directness of her eyes seemed to assure him; but however much the friend might rejoice in believing that he alone had anything to conceal, the repressed lover, most inconsistently, felt a pang. Perior only consented to recognize his own contentment with the safe footing upon which he found himself.

Camelia smiled at him, and he smiled at her, smiles that might have been children kissing and “making up”; frank, and bravely light.

“I thought you were in London,” said Camelia. “No; come back, Siegfried, we are going no farther; for you were coming to us, I suppose, Alceste?” She could look at him quite directly. She was not ashamed, no, mercifully she was not ashamed, that was her jubilant thought. After the pang of the first moment she felt the strong conviction, borne in upon her by her own calmness, that her love for him could never shame her, nor her confession of it. The warm power of his friendship kept her from petty terrors. She felt, in a moment, that on her courage depended their future relationship. To ignore the past, to make him ignore it, would be to regain, to keep her friend.

“Yes, I was going to you—of course,” said Perior, smiling, as they went towards the road together.

“I have been to Italy, you know, but I came back some time ago. I thought I might be of use.”

“Ah! I should have liked to have been of use! but I had been too badly bitten to dare put out a finger!”

“I wouldn’t put out fingers, if I were you; it isn’t safe—when, they are so pretty.” The intimacy was almost caressing; she leaned against it thankfully. Proud to show him that of the crying child there was not a trace, she determined on a swift glance at the past that would put him quite at ease.

“And you are coming back? Since this dreary business of the worsted right is over you won’t exile yourself any longer—and rob us? All your friends will be glad to have you again!”

“Will they indeed?” his eyes sought hers for a moment, seemed to see in them the past’s triumphant mausoleum, presented for inspection quite magnificently.

“Thanks, Camelia.” The boldness delighted him, delighted all of him except that grumbling prisoner who, in his dungeon, felt foolishly aggrieved. “Yes, I am coming back—since I am welcome,” he said, adding while they went along the road, “As for the worsted right, the right usually is worsted, in the first place. One must try to keep one’s faith in eventual winning.”

“Tell me,” said Camelia, feeling foundations quite secure, since each had helped the other, “Mr. Rodrigg’s opposition, that last speech of his—the satanic eloquence of it!—you don’t think—ah! say you don’t think me altogether responsible?”

“Would it please you—a little—to think you were?” The old rallying smile pained her.

“Ah, don’t! That has been knocked out of me—really! Don’t imply such a monstrous perversion of vanity.”

“I retract. No, Camelia, I don’t think you altogether responsible. The eloquence would always have been against us, its satanic quality was, I fear, your doing.”

“Yet, I meant for the best—indeed I did. Say you believe that.”

“Indeed, I do believe it, Camelia.”

They were nearing home when he said, “You were in London—I heard from Lady Tramley.”

“Yes, I went up on business.”

“Did you? How are Lady Paton and Mary?”

“Very well. You don’t ask about my business,”—Camelia smiled round at him.

“Very blunt in me. What was the business, Camelia?” His answering smile made amends.

Camelia placed herself against her background.

“I am building model cottages! You should see how economical we have become! Your glory is diminished!”

“With all my heart!” cried Perior, with a laugh of real surprise and pleasure. “Lady Tramley did not tell me. Good for you, CÉlimÈne!”

It was delightful to bring him into the drawing-room that she had left only an hour before. Camelia almost fancied herself perfectly happy as she flung open the door with the announcement—

“Here is Alceste, Mamma!” No nervousness was possible before her mother and Mary; it required no effort to act for them since she had so successfully performed her part to him. Mrs. Jedsley was gone, but Mary and Lady Paton sat before the fire, Mary reading aloud. She dropped the book; Camelia’s voice, in her ears, sounded with a brazen clang of victory, and Perior seemed to her conquered, brought captive in an old bondage. She could hardly speak, hardly welcome him; his return crushed every hope of his liberation, the joy of seeing him was a mere desolation. With a settled dulness she listened to them—all three talking and exclaiming.

Perior had taken her hand, had shaken it warmly, looking at her with kindest eyes; but now he listened to Lady Paton, and Lady Paton, of course, after the first flood of rejoicing, condolences, and questionings, was talking of Camelia.

The resentment that had smouldered in Mary for many months seemed now to leap, and lick her heart with little flames of hatred. How she hated Camelia; she turned the black thought quite calmly in her mind—it was not unfamiliar.

Lady Paton was telling Perior about the cottages; she was rather proud of Camelia’s beneficent schemes, though gently teasing her about some of their phases: “And, Michael, she is going to make them into veritable palaces of art. Specially designed furniture—and Japanese prints on the walls! Now they won’t care about prints, will they?”

“They ought to, Camelia thinks,” laughed Perior, looking at Camelia, who, hat and coat thrown aside, leaned forward in the lamplight, smiling and radiant, the pathos that her thinner face had gained emphasizing its enchanting loveliness.

Mary looked at her too, at the curves of the figure in the perfect black dress, at the narrow white hands, one lying on her knee, like a flower, with the almost exaggerated length and delicacy of the fingers; at the profile, the frank upraised eyes, the smiling mouth, the flashing white and gold that rose from the nun-like white and black of the dress, and the wide cambric collar falling about her shoulders and clasping her throat. Beautiful! Mary felt the beauty with a sort of sickening. Of course he looked at her, had no eyes but for her. Of course he had come back.

“They must like them,” said Camelia, “I don’t see why such people should not grow into good taste; and taste is often such a negative thing—a mere leaving out of all ugliness. I have a lot of these prints; I picked them up in Paris—the arcade of the Odion, Alceste—cheap things, but excellent in their way; then a few good photographs. The rooms are to be very bare. I should ask for all decoration a vase of flowers on the table—I think I shall offer prizes to my cottagers for the best arrangement of flowers.”

“A very civilizing system!” Perior still laughed, for he found the prints and the flower-arrangements highly amusing, and he still looked at Camelia.

So that first meeting was over. It had passed so easily, with an inevitable ease, based on long years that would not be disowned. Yet when he had gone, Camelia was conscious of a sinking of the heart. The exhilarating moment could not last. Her friend had come back, fond, gently mocking, tender, yet unimpressed, blind to the change in herself she passionately clung to as consummated. As her love was noble, she thought that she had grown to match it. Her self-complacency, though on a higher plane, circled her more completely, and as the days went on, his blindness gave her a new sense of defeat. The ease remained, a tacit agreement to shut their eyes on a certain incident; it was done most successfully; they were quite prepared to meet tÊte-À-tÊte, and the inner wonder of each as to the other’s unconsciousness betrayed itself only in a certain gentle formality that grew between them. That he should come—and so often—fulfilled the only hope left her, and yet her heart was darkened at moments by the thought that in these visits there was an effort. She missed something of the old intimacy; it was not quite the same—how could it be? that, after all, would have been too big a feat of forgetfulness. He did not laugh at her, nor grow angry and rage at her, as he had used to do, yet she could not feel that he approved of her the more. He was fond of her—that was evident, even though he might find this rebuilding difficult, and undertake it from a sense of duty; but the fondness was graver than before, at least, it made no pretence of hiding its gravity.