"Going! you will leave me all alone! They have all gone!"
Perior laughed, looking at her now with the same touch of irrepressible pleasure she could usually count on arousing.
"Poor little baby! and it has a headache, too?"
She was quite sure that he wanted to stay; indeed, Camelia's certainty of Perior's fundamental fondness for her was an article of faith untouched by doubt.
"Very well, you want to show off your dress, I see." Perior's smile in its humoring coyness was charming; Camelia felt that she quite adored him when he so smiled at her. "A very pretty dress it is; I have been taking it in."
"And we will have tea in the garden," said Camelia, in tones of happy satisfaction, "and you will see how good I am--when you are good to me. And I'll tell you all about the people who are coming--for I must have more of them--droves of them; in batches, artistic batches, 'smart' batches, intellectual batches, political batches. You and I will look at them."
"Thanks; you don't limit me to a batch then?"
They were still standing near the window, and she kept a hand on his shoulder, and looked at him now with the gravity that made her face so strange.
He returned her look, smiling with a little constraint.
"We must be more together," Camelia went on, "we must take up our studying. No, Mr. Rodrigg, I can't walk with you this morning, I am reading the Agamemnon with Mr. Perior." Camelia's eyes, mouth, the delicately long lines of her cheek, quivered with the half malicious, half tender smile that tilted every curve and every shadow from calm to roguery.
"How Mr. Rodrigg will hate me, to be sure," said Perior, who at that moment felt that he would like to kiss his bunch of primroses--an illusion of dewiness possessed him.
"And now for tea under the copper beech. And I will read to you. What shall I read? It will be quite like old days!"
"When we were young together," said Perior, smiling at her so fondly that she felt deliciously reassured as to everything.
The gods always helped a young lady who helped herself. Such had been Camelia's experience in life, even when she helped herself to other people's belongings.
At all events, with hardly a qualm of conscience, Camelia enjoyed the afternoon she had wrested from poor Mary.