“Us! He! Alas! he will swamp you,” she repeated. “He will turn you into a pillar of salt—looking back, and being sorry. You to be wasted!” was the last Camelia heard.
When she had gone Camelia went slowly across the lawn; Perior, she knew, was lurking about the garden waiting for her. Some of Mrs. Fox-Darriel’s remarks had cut—so far less deeply, though, than her own thoughts during past months. It was the strong revival of these thoughts that pained her more than the mode of revival.
It was dusk, a pensive dusk, the evening sky faintly barred with pink. Perior was walking up and down the garden between rows of tally growing flowers. Was the thought of his patience and loneliness, of her selfishness in prolonging them, a mere sophistry meant to hide her own longing for happiness? As she walked down the path towards him her mind juggled with this thought; it was very confusing.
“Who do you think it was?” she asked, putting her hand in his, a little douceur Perior had never presumed upon.
“Mrs. Jedsley? Mrs. Grier? Lady Haversham?” he asked affably, but scanning, as she felt, the sadness of her face.
“No—the past has been having a flick at me—Mrs. Fox-Darriel the whip.”
“Ah yes. I never liked her.”
“There is not much harm in her.”
“No, perhaps not,” Perior acquiesced.
“I told her,” said Camelia, after a little pause in which they turned a corner of the garden, and walked down it again by an outward path.