Camelia sat coldly unresponsive, and Lady Paton tried to smile at Mrs. Jedsley's remarks and to believe them purely humorous.
"I am sorry for poor Michael," she said, "I fear he has taken it to heart." This unconscious opening was only too gratefully seized upon by Mrs. Jedsley, who, after a meaning glance at Mary, fixed, over her tea-cup, sharp eyes on Camelia.
"Ah!" she said, "he is a man cut out for misfortunes--they all fit him. He is bound to fail in everything he undertakes."
"I can't agree with you there," Camelia spoke acidly. "I think he succeeds at a great many things."
"Things he doesn't care about, then, you may be sure of that. Fortune follows such men like a stray dog they have no use for, while they are looking for their own lost pet."
Camelia drank her tea in silence, priding herself somewhat on her forbearance, pondering, too, on the pathos of Mrs. Jedsley's simile in which she could only see a purely personal applicability. It was not him the stray dog followed, but any number followed her--and it was she who had lost her all.
But would he not come back? Might she not see him again? To be with him--brave, self-controlled, and reticent, how well worth the fuller pain! Pain was so far preferable to these dragging mists where she waited. She might be--she must be--developing, but she must measure herself beside him to know just how much she had grown. It pleased her to see herself smiling sadly upon his unwitting kindness--for since he had thought it a folly he should think it now a folly outgrown. It pleased her to think that now exterior things mattered less to her than to him; he, for all his self-defence of calm, still winced under the whips of material circumstance; no doubt he was now tearing his heart out over the defeat of the bill, and trying to persuade himself that he had always expected it! She saw all material circumstance with Buddhistic indifference. This thought dwelt pleasantly while she drank her tea. Looking from the window she saw the winter afternoon not yet gray, and her contemplative mood impatient of the chiming sharp and mild which her mother and Mrs. Jedsley made, she left them to go out. First, though, she bent over her mother and kissed her. It gave her content to find tender demonstration becoming more and more an unforced habit.