“Mary—dear——”
“I do not mind.”
“No, one does not, with him. I will see him, tell him.
“Talk—be nice to him; do not be angry with him because he will not marry me.” Her smile hurt Camelia, who bent over her, saying—
“If I had not gone!—you would not be here now; we might have kept you well much longer.”
“That would have been a pity—wouldn’t it?” said Mary, quite without bitterness.
“Oh, Mary! Could we not have made you happy?”
“Perhaps it is knowing that I can never be well that keeps me now from being sad,” Mary answered; “don’t cry, Camelia—I am not sad.”
But Camelia cried as she went down the stairs.
A pale spring sunshine filled the morning-room, where she found Perior. She had hardly noticed the outside world for the last few days, and it gave her now a sweetly poignant shock to see that the trees were all blurred with green, a web of life embroidering the network of black branches; beyond them a high, pale, spring sky. She saw the green really before seeing Perior, for he was looking at it, his back turned to her as she came in. Then, as he faced her, his aging struck her more forcibly than the world’s renewal of youth. As she looked at him, and despite the memory of their last words together, despite the tears upon her cheeks, she smiled. She had forgiven him. He had been right, she wrong; and then—his sad face, surely his hair had whitened? The love for Mary that overflowed her heart seemed to clasp him in its pity and penitence, but she could only feel it as the overflow.