Perior replied shortly, and it was with very little love that she watched him walk over the lawn. Camelia really was a fool, and who knew how far her folly might not go.
Camelia was still under the copper-beech, and still talking to Mr. Rodrigg. Perior perforce acknowledged her innocence of flirtatious methods. Her earnest pose—elbows on the arm of her chair, hands clasped, head gravely intent—denoted the seriousness with which she took her rôle.
Mr. Rodrigg’s smile might have warned her. He balanced a teaspoon neatly on his cup, and looked from it to her, vastly unimpressed as to the real purport of the conversation.
Perior’s mood was too miserable, too savage, to allow him more than a mere dart of cynical amusement at her folly. Camelia turned her head, surprised at seeing him. Smiling a complacent little smile she patted the chair beside her.
“So you came back after all.”
“Yes.” The nipped monosyllable, like a sudden douche of icy water, told her that since he had left her their relations had changed, and changed very much for the worse. Her conjectures sprang immediately to Mary. Bother Mary! what had she said? But at the thought of what she might have said Camelia knew that her heart was shaking. Her look, on a first impulse, would have been entreating, but in the presence of a third person it grew cold in answer to his, and she turned again to Mr. Rodrigg.
“Go, on, please; I want your answer. I have still that one fallacy to demolish, you know.”
Mr. Rodrigg observed Perior affably; he was a really important opponent. “Miss Paton wishes, I believe, to institute a sort of eighteenth century rôle for women in politics,” he said, “the rôle that obtained in France during that ominous century. She expects to rule England through her causeries.”
“Indeed, I fancy that England would be very prettily ruled!” said Camelia, laughing.
Perior switched the dust on his boots and made no reply.