“Oh, I am, thanks.” Mary averted her eyes.
Perior’s brow had an added look of gloom this morning. His eyes followed hers. The drizzling rain half blotted out the first faint purpling of the trees. “What a dreary day!” he ejaculated, with a long, involuntary sigh. He was not thinking of Mary; she saw that very plainly, though her eyes were fixed on the blurred tree-tops.
“Very dreary,” she echoed. He looked down at her again, this time with a certain pain and interest that Mary did not see. On his own thoughts, the perplexing juggling of “If she still loves me as I love her, why resist?” the ensuing fear of yielding, and yielding for no better reason than that he could not resist, broke the thought of Mary. It could not be a very big thought. Mary was a quiet, uneventful little person, spending a contented existence under her aunt’s wings, useful often as a whip wherewith to lash Camelia, but pitiful mainly from his sense of the contrast of which he really believed Mary quite unconscious. Something, now, in her still face, in the lax weariness of her thin hand, lying on the account book, roused in him a groping instinct. He looked at the hand with a certain surprise. Its thinness was remarkable.
“You do look badly, Mary,” he said. “Tell me, are you dreary, too? Can I do anything for you? We must have some rides when it grows finer.” His thoughts, as usual, gave Camelia an accusing blow.
“You are bored, tired, unhappy like the rest of us, Mary. Is that any consolation?” He smiled at her. She felt the smile in his voice, but did not dare to meet it, bending her head over the account books.
“Don’t do those stupid sums!”
“Oh, I like them!” Indeed, the scrupulous duties were her one frail barrier against the black sea of engulfing thought. And then, her heart just rising in the false but delicious joy of his kind presence, came a call, a call not dreary like the day, but fatally sweet and clear, the sound of it as if a flower had suddenly flung open rosy petals on the grayness.
“Alceste, come here! I want you.”
“Our imperious Camelia,” said Perior with a slight laugh. “Well, good-bye, Mary. Don’t do any more sums, and don’t look at the rain. Get a nice, cheerful book and sit down at the fire. Amuse yourself, won’t you?” He clasped her hand and was gone.
Mary sat quite still, moving her pen in slow curves, waves, meaningless figures over the paper. The arrested sob seemed frozen, and no tears came. She looked dully at the black zigzags on the paper while she listened to the distant sound of voices in the hall, Camelia’s laugh, a lower tone from Perior, Camelia’s cheerful good-bye.