She winced and caught her breath, and then with a sudden irresponsible movement she put her hands to her face, and he saw that she was crying.
His own hands moved convulsively, but almost immediately Camilla had mastered her weakness.
"Don't ... think me quite a fool," she said, "and don't, please don't, run away with the idea that I want to cry. I must be very strong now.... I never want to cry ... tears are useless at all times, but they are worse than useless now. I believe," she said, as she dried her eyes hurriedly, "that it won't surprise you in the least to be told that I have always been more or less in difficulty. Of course it is money—hateful, horrible, horrible money."
She got up and moved away from him, still drying her eyes.
"I dare say lots of people have told you all there is to know about me, and so you may have heard that the only money I have in the world to live upon has come to me from my husband's people. Well! then you will understand a little bit why I am so upset to-day when I tell you that Colonel Lancing, that is, the children's grandfather, is so angry with me that he has stopped my money, and ... and ..." she broke off here, and put her hands against her trembling lips. "He thinks to force my hand, you see," she said, hoarsely; "he knows I have nothing, that there is no one to give me anything but himself, he knows that if I am content to starve myself I cannot let the children starve, and that is why he says the children are to belong to him. Oh!" she turned again, flinging out her hands with a little gesture of despair, "I am not going to try and defend myself. I know better than anybody can tell me how foolish I have been. What a multitude of wrong things I have done. I have been preparing myself for some sort of punishment—people who do wrong always do get punished, don't they? But I never, never thought of this. Of course he cannot take them from me by law. I am their mother, they are mine ... mine.... But if he cuts off the money, that gives him law!"
She sat down on a couch the other side of the room and dabbed her eyes with her wet handkerchief, and Rupert Haverford looked across at her with eyes that were wet too.
The silence that was so natural to him, and so irritating to Camilla, became oppressive now. She got up with a jerk.
"You would make me tell you what the matter was with me, and now I have bored you," she said. "Other people's troubles are bores, say what one will!"
And then he found his voice.
"Oh! don't let us play with realities," he said. "I could not speak at first because, well! because I am not good at words. You must have realized that by this time; and you must have realized something else, Camilla, and that is that everything that concerns you is dear to me, so dear that I tremble at the thought that I am still outside your life." He left the fire and went nearer to her. "I came here to-day," he said, "because I found that I could not go through another twenty-four hours without seeing you. You mean so much to me. I had no idea whether you would care for me to come; indeed, the last time I saw you I tormented myself by imagining that you found me tedious, and dull, that you wanted to have no more to do with me. Still I had to come."