"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.
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."
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.
"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."
"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.