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!”