The Baron put the camellia in her now unresisting hand, and amused himself with pulling to pieces the petals of the other flower. Adeline burst into a violent paroxysm of tears, and hurried on to the colonnade.
And all about a stupid French marigold!
"Let her go and have a cry to herself," said M. de Castella, walking off with the Baron; "it will bring her to reason. The coquetry of women passes belief. They are all alike. It appears I was mistaken when I deemed my daughter an exception."
Adeline, in her tears and excitement, rushed across the lawn. It was certainly a senseless thing to cry about, but, just then, a straw would have ruffled her equanimity. She had been compelled to wear the hated bracelet: she had been told that she would very speedily be made the wife of de la Chasse; she had stood by him, recognized by the crowd of guests as his future wife; and, blended with all this, was a keen sensation of disappointment at the non-appearance of Mr. St. John. She stood with her forehead pressed against the bark of a tree, sobbing aloud in her anguish where none could hear her. Presently, her ear caught the sound of footsteps, and she prepared to dart further away: but they were some that she knew and loved too well. He was coming through the shrubbery at a rapid pace, and she stood out and confronted him.
"Why, Adeline!" he exclaimed, in astonishment. And, then, the momentary restraint on her feelings removed, she fell forward in his arms, and sobbed aloud with redoubled violence.
"Oh, Adeline, what ails you? What has happened? Be calm, be calm, my only love! I am by your side now: what grief is there that I cannot soothe away?"
He became quite alarmed at her paroxysm of grief, and, half leading, half carrying her to the nearest bench, seated her there and laid her head upon his arm, and held her gently to him, and spoke not a word until she was calmer.
By degrees she told him all. The gift of the bracelet, her mother's threats of the coming marriage--threats they sounded to Adeline--and the dispute with the Baron. Upon this last point she was rather obscure. "I had a simple flower in my dress, and he wanted me to replace it with a rare one, a camellia." She did not say it was the one he had given her; she would rather have led him to think that it was not: never, until she should be indeed his, could she tell him how passionately and entirely she loved. But he divined all; he required no telling. And yet, knowing this; knowing, as he did, how her very life was bound up in his; how could he, only a few weeks later, doubt, or profess to doubt, of this enduring love?
"Adeline," he said, as he paced the narrow path restlessly in the moonlight, she still sitting on the bench, "I have done very wrong: wrong by you and your friends, wrong by myself, wrong by de la Chasse. I see it now. I ought to have declared all before he came to Beaufoy. I will see M. de Castella tomorrow morning."
She shivered, as if struck by a cold wind. "Remember your promise."