It was so strange, so natural, and yet so unreal to see Camilla again!
She looked marvellously well; that fretted, excited, nervous air had gone entirely.
"You look _so_ pretty, mummy darling, just like a new, young girl."
The presence of the children relieved the situation to a great extent, yet both Caroline and Cuthbert Baynhurst's wife felt the strain of this meeting sharply.
"You're going to stay with me a day or two?" said Camilla, entreatingly. "It will be sweet to have you." Then with a flash of her old merriment, "remember we are cousins now."
"I am afraid I must go back this evening; but the children will be all right with Dennis."
"Of course, if you must go, you must go." Then she added, restlessly, "I hope we shall not stay here more than a few days ourselves. It was horrible coming at all. And then I am so afraid this illness will upset Cuthbert. He is so sensitive. I have entreated him not to stay longer than a few minutes in his mother's room. I wish he need not go in at all. Cancer is such an awful thing."
Caroline said nothing. She had no reason to care one way or another about Mrs. Baynhurst, but it was impossible for her to withhold her pity in such an hour as this; because she knew, none better, the hopelessness of the mother's passionate love for her second child, and because it had been a creed with Octavia Baynhurst to sneer at womanly weakness, and suffering; to deny almost scornfully the terrors of death.
And now death had come upon her--and what a death!
There was a tragedy to Caroline in the thought of that fine intellect, that strong nature, surrendering itself to the ravages of the most appalling disease the human frame can know.
As the children danced off to another room to find Dennis, and they were alone, Camilla turned and stretched out both her hands to the girl.
"Have I lost you, Caroline?" she said; "you look at me so strangely, your eyes hurt me. I have always clung to the hope that you would never change, that you would always love me."
Caroline paused a moment, and then took the hands for an instant.
"Are you happy?" she asked in a low voice.
The look that flashed into the other woman's face was a revelation to her.
"So happy," she said. "Oh, Caroline, it is all the beginning over again, only better, truer, and, please God, more lasting! Caroline, I love him. He is so young, so beautiful, so full of poetry, he makes life quite different! Oh, I love him, and I never thought I should love any one again after Ned."