"Sorry! Oh, Mary--what have you to be sorry for?"

"I was wicked--I hated you--I struck you."

"I deserved hatred, dear Mary."

"I should not hate you. It hurts me."

"Oh my darling!" sobbed her cousin, rising, and bending over her.

"It hurts me," Mary repeated, but in a voice unmoved.

"Do you still hate me, Mary?"

There was a pause before she answered--and then with a certain faltering, "I--don't know."

"Will you--can you listen, while I tell you something?" said Camelia almost in a whisper--for Mary's voice was hardly more, "I must tell you, Mary, I deserve everything you said, and yet--you misjudged me. Will you hear the truth?" Camelia clasped the hand more tightly to her breast. "I am not going to defend myself--I only want you to know the truth; perhaps--you will be a little sorry for me then--and be able to love me--a little."

Mary looked up at her silently, and, when she paused, said nothing; yet her intent look seemed to a.s.sent.

"It will not give you pain," Camelia said tremblingly, "the pain is all mine here. Mary--I love him too." The words came with a sob. She sank into the chair, and dropping Mary's hand she leaned her elbows on the bed and hid her face.

"I loved him, Mary, and--I imagined that he must love me. My vanity was so great that I thought I could choose or reject him. I accepted Sir Arthur--from spite--partly, and then I was dreadfully frightened. On the very day I accepted Sir Arthur I sent for Mr. Perior. Mary, I made love to him. I did not tell him I was engaged; I wanted to escape from that blunder unscathed. I could not believe in his embarra.s.sment, nor in the reality of his scorn when he found me out. I broke my engagement--as you know. I went to Mr. Perior's house. I entreated him to love me--I hung about his neck, cried, implored. He did not love me; he rejected me. He scorns me--he is sorry for me; he is my friend, but he scorns me. I was not playing with him--you see that now. I adore him--and he does not love me at all."

Uncovering her face, Camelia found Mary's eyes fixed upon her.

"Do you understand now, Mary, why I went to him? I loved you so--was so sorry for you--so infinitely sorry--for had I not felt it all? I never told him that you thought he might have loved you; but I thought it myself, I thought that he might love you, indeed, when he _knew_ you--knew the sweetness, the sadness of your hidden love. If he refused, Mary, it was because he respected you too highly and himself--to act any falsity towards you. It was not like my rejection; there was no shame, no abas.e.m.e.nt for you. You have his reverent pity, his deep, loving devotion. Don't regret, dear Mary, that through my well-meant folly he really knows you now." She paused, and Mary still lay silent, slowly closing and unclosing her hand on the sheet.

"Believe me, Mary," said Camelia, the monotony of her recitative yielding to an appealing tremor, "I have told you the truth--the very truth. I have not hidden a thought from you."

"You love him?" Mary asked, almost musingly.

"Yes, dear, yes. We are together there."

"I never saw it; never guessed it."

"Like you, Mary, I can act."

"And you wanted him to marry me," Mary added presently, pondering it seemed.

"Oh, Mary!" said Camelia, weeping, "I did. I longed for it, prayed for it--I would have given my life to have him marry you. Mary, believe me, when I tell you that to atone in however a little measure for your dreary life, I would die--oh gladly, gladly."

"Would it not have been worse than dying?" Mary asked in a voice that seemed suddenly to subtly smile, though she herself lay unsmiling in the shadowed whiteness of the bed.

"What--worse?"

"To see him marry me." Camelia gazed at her.

"I think, Mary," she said presently, "I could have seen it without one pang for myself; I would have been too glad for you to think of that.

And then--he does not love me. The iron entered my soul long ago. I have long since lost even the bitterness of hope."

"And he does not love you," Mary repeated quietly, raising her eyes and looking away a little.

"He does not, indeed."

Camelia's quivering breaths quieted to a waiting depth. But Mary for a long time said nothing more. Her hand lay across her breast, and above it her face now surely smiled.

At last she turned her eyes on her cousin. Looking at her very gently, she said, "But I love you, Camelia."

CHAPTER XXVIII

Camelia was sitting again by Mary's bed when Perior was announced the next morning.

"You must go and see him to-day," said Mary.

"Why--must I?"

"I should like to see him," Mary's voice had now a thread only of breath; to speak at all she had to speak very slowly, "and you must tell him first, that I know."

"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.

"She wants to see you," she said, giving him her hand, and she added, for the joy of last night must find expression, "She knows everything.

She followed me that day--and half guessed the truth--only half; I had to tell her all. And she has forgiven me--for everything." Camelia bent her forehead against his shoulder and sobbed--"She is dying!--and she loves me!"

"My darling Camelia," said Perior, putting his hand on her hair.