Camelia was now becoming conscious of the definiteness of Mary’s heavy stare. It was like a stone, and under the weight of it she groped, staggering, in a wilderness of formless conjectures. Mary could not know why she had gone. A pang of terror shot through her. Mary’s next words riveted the terror.
“I saw you. I know why you went. I know everything,” said Mary. Camelia’s horror kept silence, though the room seemed to whirl round with her. Had Mary by some unknown means reached the Grange before she did? Had she been hidden near the laboratory? Had she heard? Were all merciful lies impossible? She felt her very lips freeze in a rigid powerlessness.
“You went to tell him that I loved him?” Mary’s eyes opened widely as she spoke, and she walked up to her cousin, close to her.
“You told him that I loved him,” she repeated, and Camelia in her nightmare horror felt the hatred of the pale eyes.
“You don’t dare deny that you told him.” No, Camelia did not dare deny. She looked down spellbound at Mary. She was afraid of her, horribly afraid of her. It was like the approach of a nightmare animal, its familiar seeming making its strangeness the more awful. She did not dare deny. She could not move away from her; she was paralyzed in her dread. Mary looked at her as though conscious of her own power.
“You told him, so that he might comfort you, tell you he had never loved me, never could have loved me. You betrayed me to save yourself from that reproach of robbing me.” It was like awakening with a gasp that Camelia now cried—
“No, no, Mary! Oh no.”
She could speak. She could clasp her hands. “No, no, no,” she repeated almost with joy.
“You lie. You are lying. What is the good of lying to me now? It is easy for you to lie. You went to ask him the truth, and he gave it to you. For he would never have loved me, whatever I may have hoped—even believed at moments.”
“No, Mary; no, no!” Mary’s dreadful supposition made Camelia feel the reality as a peace, a refuge. That world of black cruelty where Mary wandered, that at least was untrue, an illusion. Not hatred, not deceit surrounded her, but love, and pity, and tenderness.