“She will be,” Camelia repeated.
“I beg of you—I implore you, Camelia.” He hardened his face to meet her look, searching, eager, pitiful.
“How could I say this unless I believed you loved me—had always loved me? Don’t speak; don’t say no; don’t send me away. You are angry. You have the right to be; but, ah! if you only knew what I feel for you.”
“Don’t tell me, Camelia.”
“But I must. I love everything about you—I always have. When you were near me I saw every gesture you made, heard every word you spoke, knew every thought you had about me. I love your little ways—I know them all; that wag of your foot when you are angry, the look of your teeth when you smile, your hands, your face, your dear rough hair——”
Perior had turned from red to white, and still looking at him, shaking her head a little, she finished very simply on a long sigh—
“I can’t live without you. I can’t.”
“Camelia, I can’t marry you,” he said; and then, taking breath in the ensuing silence, “You are mistaken. I don’t love you. I have your welfare at my heart; I wish you all happiness, all good. I am sorry, terribly sorry for you; but I do not love you. You must believe me. I do not love you. I will not marry you.—God forgive me for the lie,” he said to himself; “but no, no, no, I cannot marry her, poor impulsive, wilful, half noble, half pitiful child, a thousand times no.” The strong rebellion of his very soul steadied him. He could yield without a tremor to his pity, could take her hands and hold them in a clasp convincingly paternal and pitying.
Camelia closed her eyes, drawing in a long breath, too sharp in its accepted bitterness for the break of a sob. Her face, with this tragedy of still woe upon it, was almost unrecognizable. Until now it had been a face of triumph. Defeat—and that at last she recognized defeat he saw—changed its very lines; the iron entered her soul, and something left her face for ever. For a long time she did not speak, and her voice seemed dimmed, as though spoken from a great distance, when she said, her eyes still closed, “Then you never loved me!”
“Never,” said Perior, who, encompassed by the saving lie, could freely breathe in the tonic atmosphere of his resolute pain.