"Nice, pretty little mamma," she whispered.
In her long coat, Siegfried trotting in front of her, Camelia breasted the tonic January wind. There was just a crispness of snow on the ground; in the lanes thin patches of ice made walking wary. She emerged from the shelter of the hedges on to the fine billowy stretch of common, where the wind sang, and the sunset in the west made a wide red bar. Siegfried's adventurous spirit soon warmed him to an energetic gallop through the dead fern and heather, and Camelia followed his lead, intending to cut across to the highroad, and by its long curve return home. It was in lifting her eyes to this road that she saw suddenly a distant figure walking along it at a quick pace that would bring them together at the very point she aimed for. It needed only the very first brush of a glance to tell her that it was Perior. For a moment joy and fear, courage and cowardice, pride and shame, struggled within her. Her step faltered, stopped even, and Siegfried stopping too, looked round at her, interrogation in the prick of his ears.
Camelia walked on slowly. Perior had seen and recognized her--that was evident. Whatever might be his own press of feeling he did not hesitate. He took off his cap and hailed her gaily, and Camelia felt that her answering hand-wave helped to prepare the way for a meeting most creditable to them both.
He did not fear the meeting, or would not show he did, for he advanced over the heather at a pace resolutely unembarrassed. In another moment they were face to face, and then she could see that his repressed a tremor, and was conscious that her own was, with the same attempt, a little rigid in its smile. Partly to recover from this shock of seeing her again, partly to give her time to recover from her own emotion, Perior raised her outstretched hand to his lips. He was so determined in his entrenched resistance to the lover he knew himself to be (the lover whose complaints had brought him rebelliously back again, his coming a sop angrily thrown at the uncontrollable gentleman on condition, that satisfied so far, he would keep still), so sure was Perior, the friend, of the bargain, that the kiss was most successfully friendly. It sealed delicately the bond he insisted on recognizing between himself and Camelia. His relief was great, in looking at her again, to see that she, too, fully recognized it, and that perhaps her courage was helped by the fact that the mood--the astonishing mood--had passed. It would much simplify matters if it had. He longed to be with her again, a longing her tacit acquiescence in the old friendship could alone justify him in satisfying. That his coming had not been indelicately ill-judged the directness of her eyes seemed to assure him; but however much the friend might rejoice in believing that he alone had anything to conceal, the repressed lover, most inconsistently, felt a pang. Perior only consented to recognize his own contentment with the safe footing upon which he found himself.