Camelia took the cup of tea her cousin offered her without looking away from the fire, where she saw the cottages charmingly pictured, and she and Perior looking at them—friends.
“Your boots are wet, dear, are they not?” asked Lady Paton; “it has been raining.”
“They are wet, I think. Mary, just ring, will you? Grant must take them off down here. I am too tired, too comfortable, to go upstairs.”
Camelia sighed as though the fundamental heaviness of her mood rose through the seeming light-heartedness of tone; sighed, and yet the relief of getting outside herself was filling her with an exhilarating energy.
As she drank her tea, ate a muffin, Mary browning it nicely for her—“How cosy to have tea by ourselves,” said Camelia, “and toast our own muffins!”—she talked as she had not talked for a long time. Her mind ran quickly, escaping its miserable thraldom, from point to point of the project.
She pushed aside the tea-things to make with spoons and saucers a plan of the new scheme.
“That high bit of land, you know, with the beech woods behind it; I’ll have six of the cottages, with big gardens; and what a view from the front windows. I will furnish them, too. I must see an architect at once: I’ll go up to town for that, and talk it over with Lady Tramley. Where is her last letter, I wonder? I remember her asking me for some date; but that doesn’t matter. She wanted me to go out, and of course I won’t.” Camelia sprang up to rumple over the leaves of the blotter, the drawers of the writing-desk. “Where is the letter? In the library, I wonder?”
“There is a whole pile, dear, in the small cabinet. You did not care to look at them. I think they had better be gone over.”
“No; here is hers. I don’t care about the others. I don’t want to hear anything about any one,” Camelia added with some bitterness, as she dropped into her chair again and held out her foot to Grant, who had come in with the shoes. “Yes; she asks me for next week.”
“If you won’t go out, dear, it may be rather annoying for her.”