"Oh, you are a little sorry now," she said, in a voice of cold impassiveness that froze Camelia's sobs to instant silence. "I make you uncomfortable--a little more uncomfortable than when I cough. It is strange that when I never did you any harm--always tried to please you--you should have found pleasure in hurting me. Do you remember all the little jeers at me before him? You mocked my dulness, my ugliness. He did not laugh. It made him sad, because he did not like to see you unbeautiful in anything; but he must have seen me more stupid, more ugly than before. And when he was with me for one moment you would take him away. And you lied to keep him to yourself, like that day we were to have ridden together; and if you had known that I loved him you would have been all the more anxious to have him--to hurt me."
"No, no, Mary!" Camelia's helpless sobs burst out again.
"Yes; why can I speak to you like this? because I am dying, you see that I am dying--that gives me my only advantage; I can tell you what I think of you, and you don't dare reply. You would not dare say to me now that I am a spy--that I have sneaking eyes. I hate you, Camelia! I hate you! Oh! oh!" She rose to her feet suddenly, and at the change of tone--the wail--Camelia uncovered her eyes.
"I am going to die! I am going to die! And I love him, and he does not care." Mary groped blindly to a sofa, fell upon it, buried her head in the cushions.
Camelia rose to her feet, for she had been kneeling, and stood listening to the dreadful sobs.
Her life had never known a comparable terror. The blackness of Mary's point of view encompassed her. She felt like a murderer in the night. She crept towards the sofa. "Oh, forgive me, say a word to me."
"Won't you forgive me?" The tears streamed down Camelia's cheeks.
"Go away. I hate you," Mary repeated. There was a compulsion in the voice Camelia could not disobey. Trembling and weeping she went out of the room.
Mary lay there sobbing. She had never so realized to the full the extent and depth of her woe, yet there was relief in the realization, relief in the flinging off of secrecy and shame. That Camelia should suffer, however slightly, restored a little the balance of justice, satisfied a little the outraged sense of solitary suffering, atoned a very little for fate's shameful unfairness. To poor Mary, sobbing over her one triumph, the morality of the universe seemed a little vindicated now that she had taken into her own hand the long-delayed lash of vengeance.