Guy and Pauline

Guy looked round the room for any sign of his friend; but there was nothing except the Shakesperean record of his presence. Pauline felt hurt that he should be so much interested in a friend, when but a moment ago he had brought her here as if her presence were the only thing that counted for his evening's pleasure.

"I must find out where he is," exclaimed Guy.

Now he wanted to be rid of her, thought Pauline, and for the first time, when he had kissed her, she kissed him coldly in response. More bitter still was the thought that he did not remonstrate: he had not noticed. Pauline said she must hurry away, and Guy did not persuade her to stop. Oh, how she hated this friend of his; she had no one in whom she would be even mildly interested when she was with Guy. He took her home in the canoe, speculating all the way about Michael Fane's whereabouts; and as Pauline went across the Rectory paddock there were tears of mortification in her eyes that sometimes burnt as hotly even as with jealousy's rage.

Her mother was on the lawn, when she got back, and Pauline blinked her eyes a good deal to throw the blame of tears upon the sun.

"Ah, you're back. Let's take a little walk round the garden," said Mrs. Grey in the nervous manner that told of something on her mind.

They went into the larger wall-garden and walked along the wide herbaceous borders through a blaze of snapdragons that here all day had been swallowing the sunshine.

"Where did you go with Guy?" her mother asked.

"We went down the river, and they're cutting the grass in the big meadow and then afterwards...."

"Oh, Pauline, afterwards you went into Guy's house with him?"

Pauline nodded.

"Pauline, how could you do such a thing?"

"I only went to say good-night. I wasn't there five minutes."

Why should an action so simple be vexing her mother?

"Are you angry with me for going?"

"You must never do such a thing again," said Mrs. Grey more crossly than Pauline had ever heard her. "Monica saw you go in as she was walking down Shipcot hill, and she has just this moment come and told me."

"But why shouldn't I go in and say good-night?" Pauline asked. "There were people in the churchyard. I thought it was better to say good-night in the house."

Her mother was tremulously pink with vexation, and Pauline looked at her in surprize. It was really unaccountable that such a trifling incident as going into Guy's house could have made her as angry as this. She must have offended her in some other way.

"Mother, what have I done to annoy you?"

"I can't think what made you do anything so stupid as that. I can't think. I can't think. So many people may have seen you go in."

"Well, Mother darling, surely by this time," said Pauline, "everybody must know we are really engaged."

Her mother stood in an access of irritation.

"And don't you understand how that makes it all the worse? Please never do such an inconsiderate thing again. You can imagine how much it upset Monica, when she ran back to tell me."

"Why didn't she come in and fetch me?" asked Pauline. "That would have been much easier. I think she thoroughly enjoyed making a great fuss about nothing. Everybody has been criticizing me lately. I know you all disapprove of anybody's being in love."

"I have to say what I think sometimes," Pauline replied rebelliously.

"And as for Guy," Mrs. Grey went on, "I am astonished at his thoughtlessness. I can't understand how he could dream of letting you come into his house. I can't understand it."

"Yes, but why shouldn't I go in?" Pauline persisted. "Darling Mother, you go on being angry with me, but you don't tell me why I shouldn't go in."

"Can't you understand what the Wychford people might think?"

Pauline shook her head.

"Well, I shan't say any more about it," Mrs. Grey decided. "But you must promise me never never to do such a foolish thing again."

"I'll promise you never to go to Guy's house," said Pauline. "But I can't promise never to do foolish things, when such perfectly ordinary things are called foolish."

Mrs. Grey looked helplessly round her, but as neither of her two elder daughters was present she had nothing to say; and Pauline, who thought that all the fuss was due to nothing but Monica's unwarranted interference, had nothing to say either; so they walked along the herbaceous borders each with a demeanour of reproach for the other's failure to understand. The snapdragons lolled upon the sun with gold-bloomed anthers, and drank more and still more colour until they were drenched beyond the deepest dyes of crimson, extinguishing the paler hues of rose and chrome which yet at moth-time would show like lamps when the others had dulled in the discouragement of twilight.

"Darling," said Pauline utterly penitent for the least look that could have wounded her mother's feelings. "You're sweet to us. And Guy loves you nearly as much as I do."

The gong sounded upon the luteous air of the evening; and Pauline with her arm closely tucked into her mother's arm walked with her across the lawn toward the house.

"It's no good looking crossly at me," she said when like a beautiful ghost Monica came into the dining-room. "I've explained everything to Mother."

"I'm very glad you have," Monica answered austerely; and because she would not fall in with her own forgiving mood, Pauline took the gentle revenge of not expostulating with her that evening when there was an opportunity. Nor would she let Margaret refer to the subject. Her sisters were very adorable, but they knew nothing about love and it would only make them more anxious to lay down laws if she showed that she was aware of their disapproval. She would be particularly charming to them both this evening, but her revenge must be never to mention the incident to either.

The next afternoon, when Pauline went into the paddock, Guy was waiting for her on the mill-stream, her place in the canoe all ready as usual.

"Have you found your friend?" she asked, faithful to her resolution.

"Not a sign of him," said Guy. "What on earth he came for, I can't think. Miss Peasey never saw him and of course she never heard him. He must have been bicycling. However, don't let's waste time in talking about Michael Fane."

Pauline smiled at him with all her heart. How wonderful Guy was to reward her so richly for the little effort it had cost to enquire about his friend.

"I've been prospecting this morning," he announced as they shot along in the direction of the bridge. "They haven't started to make hay on the other side, so I'm going to paddle you furiously upstream until we find some secret and magical meadow where we can hide and forget about yesterday's fiasco."

They glided underneath the bridge and left it quivering in the empty sunlight behind them; they swept silently over the mill-pool while Pauline held her breath. Then the banks closed in upon their canoe and Guy fought his way against the swifter running of the river, on and on, on and on between the long grasses of the uncut meadows, on and on, on and on past the waterfall where the Abbey stream joined the main stream and gave it a wider and easier course.

"Phew, it's hot," Guy exclaimed. "Sprinkle me with water."

She splashed him laughing; and he seized her hand to kiss her dabbled fingers.

Again she sprinkled him laughing, and again he seized her hand and kissed her dabbled fingers.

"They're as cool as coral," he said. "Why are you wrinkling your nose at me? Pauline, your eyes have vanished away!"

He plucked speedwell flowers and threw them into her lap.

"When I haven't got you with me," he said, "I have to pretend that the speedwells are your eyes, and that the dog-roses are your cheeks."

"And what is my nose?" she asked, clapping her hands because she was sure he would not be able to think of any likeness.

"Your nose is incomparable," he told her: and then he bent to his paddle and made the canoe fly along so that the water fluted to right and left of the bows. Ultimately they came to an island where all the afternoon they sat under a willow that was pluming with scanty shade a thousand forget-me-nots.

Problems faded out upon the languid air, for Pauline was too well content with Guy's company to spoil the June peace. At last, however, she disengaged herself from his caressing arm and turned to him a serious and puzzled face. And when she was asking her question she knew how all the afternoon it had been fretting the back of her mind.

"Why was Mother angry with me yesterday because I came into Plashers Mead to say good-night to you?"

"Was she angry?" asked Guy.

"Well, Monica saw us and got home before me and told her, and she was worried at what people would think. What would they think?"

Guy looked at her: then he shook his fist at the sky.

She touched his arm.

"Guy, don't swear. At least not ... you'll call me superstitious and foolish," she murmured dismayfully, "but really it hurts me to hear you say that."

"I don't think you anything but the most lovely and perfect thing on earth," he vowed passionately. "And it drives me mad that people should try to spoil your naturalness ... but still ... it was thoughtless of me."

"But why, why?" she asked. "That's the word Mother used about you. Only, why, why? Why shouldn't I go and say good-night?"

"Dear, there was no harm in that. But you see, village people might say horrid things.... I was dreadfully to blame. Yes, of course I was."

She flushed like a carnation at dawn; and when Guy put his arms round her, she drew away.

"Oh, Guy," she said brokenly. "I can't bear to think of being alone to-night. I shall be asking questions all the night long, I know I shall. It's like that horrid mill-pool."

"Mill-pool?" he echoed, looking at her in perplexity.

She sighed and stared sadly down at the forget-me-nots.

"You wouldn't understand: you'd think I was hysterical and stupid."

Silently they left the island, and silently for some time they floated down the stream: then Pauline tossed her head bravely.

"Love's rather cruel in a way."

Guy looked aghast.

"Pauline, you don't regret falling in love with me?"

"No, of course not, of course not. Oh, I love you more than I can say."

July

GUY had been conscious ever since that rose-gold evening of the ragged robins of new elements having entered into his and Pauline's love for each other. All this month, however, June creeping upon them with verdurous and muffled steps had plotted to foil the least attempt on Guy's part to face the situation. Now the casual indiscretion of yesterday brought him sharply against it, and, as in the melancholy of the long Summer evening he contemplated the prospect, it appeared disquieting enough. In nine months he had done nothing: no quibbling could circumvent that deadly fact. For nine months he had lived in a house of his own, had accepted paternal help, had betrothed himself; and with every passing month he had done less to justify any single one of the steps. What were the remedies? The house might be sub-let: at any rate his father's bounty came to an end this quarter: engaging himself formally to Pauline, he could throttle the Muse and become a schoolmaster, and in two years perhaps they could be married. It would be a wrench to abandon poetry and the hope of fame, indeed it would stagger the very foundations of his pride; but rather than lose Pauline he would be content to remain the obscurest creature on earth. Literature might blazon his name: but her love blazoned his soul. Poetry was only the flame of life made visible, and if he were to sacrifice Pauline what gasping and ignoble rushlight of his own would he offer to the world?

Next morning there was a letter for Guy from his father.

It seemed fateful, the arrival of this letter on top of the doubts of last night. A day was not long in which to make up his mind. And yet, after all, a moment was enough. He ought to go: he ought to telegraph immediately before he could vacillate: he must not see Pauline first: he ought to accept this offer: farewell, fame!

Guy opened the front-door and walked into Birdwood come with a note from the Rectory.

"Miss Pauline took me away from my work to give you this most particular and important and wait for the answer," said the gardener.

Guy asked him to step inside and see Miss Peasey, while he went upstairs to write the reply.

"What, all those dellyphiniums the Rector raised with his own hand and she don't like blue!"

Birdwood shook his head to express another defeat at the hands of incomprehensible woman. A moment later, as Guy went up to his room with Pauline's note, he heard him bellow in the kitchen:

"What's this I hear, mum, about the garden being too blue?"

Then Guy closed the door of the library and shut out everything but the sound of the stream.

Guy wrote the little note to Pauline and to his father he wrote a long letter explaining that it was impossible to give up what he was doing to be a schoolmaster.

They arrived at Ladingford toward tea-time and found the barge lying by an old stone bridge about a mile away from the village. Apart from the spire of Ladingford church nothing conspicuously broke the horizon of that flat green country stretching for miles to a shadowy range of hills. Whichever way they looked, these meads extended with here and there willows and elms; close at hand was the quiet by-road that crossed the bridge and meandered over the low lands, as still and traffickless as the young Thames itself.

The Naiad was painted peacock blue; owing to the turreted poops the owner had superimposed and the balustrade with rail of gilt gadroons, it almost had the look of a dismasted Elizabethan ship.

"Anything more you'll want?" Godbold enquired.

"Nothing more, thank you, Mr. Godbold," said Mrs. Grey. "Charming ... charming ... such a pleasant drive. Good afternoon, Mr. Godbold."

The carrier turned his horse; and when the sound of the wagonette had died away, there was silence except where the stream lapped against the barge and where very far off some rooks were cawing.

"Guy ought to go and see the Lamberts at the Manor," Mrs. Grey announced at the end of the second week. "I've written to Mrs. Lambert. It will be interesting for him."

"There's the sort of stillness of fame about it," Guy whispered.

He wondered if Mrs. Lambert would now resemble at all the famous pictures of her he had seen. And would she talk familiarly of the famous people she had known? They came to the gate, entering the garden along a flagged path on either side of which runnels flowed between borders of trim box. Mrs. Lambert was sitting in a yew parlour under a blue silk umbrella that was almost a pavilion, and she received them with many comments upon the energy of walking so far on this hot afternoon.

"You would like some beer, I'm sure. There is a bell in that mulberry tree. If you toll the bell, Charlotte will bring you beer."

Guy tolled the bell, and Charlotte arrived with a pewter tray and pewter mugs of beer. Margaret would not be thirsty, but Pauline was afraid of hurting Mrs. Lambert's feelings, and she pretended to drink, lancing blue eyes at Guy over the rim of her mug.

"Home-brewed beer," Mrs. Lambert repeated dreamily, and seemed to fall asleep in the past; while in the bee-drowsed yew parlour Pauline, Margaret and Guy sat watching her. The throat of Sidonia the sorceress was hers; the heavy lids of Hipparchia were hers; the wrist of Ermengarde or Queen Blanche was hers; and the pewter tray on the grass at her feet held Circe's wine.

Then Mrs. Lambert woke up and asked if they would like to see the house.

"Toll the bell in the mulberry-tree, and Charlotte will come. You must excuse my getting up."

They followed Charlotte round the rooms of Ladingford Manor. There on the walls were the tapestries that had inspired John Lambert, and there were the tapestries even more beautiful that he himself had woven. On the tables were the books John Lambert had printed, which gave positively the aspect of being treasures by the discretion of their external appearance. In other rooms hung the original pictures of hackneyed mezzotints; and how rare they looked now with their velvety pigments of emerald and purple, of orange, cinnabar and scarlet glowing in the tempered sunlight. Margaret, as she moved from room to room, seemed with her weight of dusky hair and fastidious remoteness to belong to the company of lovely women whose romances filled these splendid scenes; but Pauline was life, irradiating with her joy each picture and giving to it the complement of its own still beauty.

"Mrs. Lambert keeps very well, miss," said Charlotte as they came out again from the house. "But of course she doesn't get about much now. Yet we can't really complain, especially with this fine weather."

"Would you like some more beer?" Mrs. Lambert asked, when they joined her again in the yew parlour.

"Oh, I did want some tea," sighed Margaret.

"I love Mrs. Lambert," cried Pauline, dancing through the meads. "Wasn't it touching of her to offer Margaret beer? Oh, Guy, when we're married and when you die and I receive young poets at Plashers Mead, shall I offer their future sisters-in-law home-brewed beer? Oh, but I'm sure I shall forget to offer them anything."

"If only this young Thames flowed on for ever," said Guy.

He and Pauline were leaning over the rail of the barge, and Guy felt a sudden impulse to snatch at the bank rich in that moment with yellow loosestrife, and by his action arrest for ever the progress of the barge, so that for ever they would stay like the lovers on a Grecian urn.

Guy went on to tell her about the decision he had taken on the day the visit to Ladingford was arranged.

"But it would have been dreadful to miss this time," Pauline declared.

"Oh, I felt it would be impossible," he agreed. "But even if our marriage is postponed for another year, you do think I ought to stick it out here, don't you? And really, you know, few lovers can have such wonderful hours as the hours we do have."

Easily she reassured him with her confidence in the rightness of his decision: easily she assuaged the ache of any lingering doubt with the proclamation of that inevitable triumph in the end.

"But we must be engaged openly," said Guy. "You know, I shall be twenty-three next month. Do you think we can be engaged properly in August?"

"Mother promised in Spring," said Pauline. "Why don't you talk to her about it? Why don't you talk to her about it now? She loves you to talk to her."

He looked round to where Mrs. Grey was sitting in a deck-chair; evidently by the rhythmic motion of her fingers she was restating to herself a tune which had formerly pleased her, as the barge glided on past a scene that changed perceptibly only in details of flowers and trees, while the great sky and the green hollow land and the blue distances rested immutable. Guy came and sat beside her.

"I've never enjoyed a fortnight so much in my life," he said.

She smiled at him, but did not speak, for whatever quartet she was restating had to be finished first. Soon the last noiseless bars played themselves and she turned round to his conversation.

Mrs. Grey sat back, so silent that Guy wondered if she had listened to a word he had been saying. He paused for a moment, and then as she did not reply, he went on:

"I also want to say how sorry I am that I asked Pauline to come into Plashers Mead to say good-night to me last month. I didn't realize, until she told me you were angry about it, what a foolish thing I'd done. I don't want you to think that, if we are formally engaged, I shall be doing stupid things like that all the time. Really, Mrs. Grey, I would always be very thoughtful."

"Oh, yes," she answered in her nervous way. "Oh, yes. I understood it to have been a kind of carelessness. But I had to speak to Pauline about it, because she is so very impulsive. It's the sort of thing I might have done myself when I was a girl. At least of course I shouldn't because the Rector ... yes ... charming ... charming ... yes.... I really think you might be engaged next month. It's your birthday next month, isn't it?"

"Thank you more than I can thank you," said Guy.

Mrs. Grey waved to Pauline, who drew close.

"Pauline darling, I've thought of such a nice birthday present for Guy ... yes ... charming, charming birthday present ... yes ... for you two to be engaged."

Pauline threw her arms round her mother's neck; and Guy in his happiness noticed at that moment how Margaret was sitting by herself on the poop in the stern. He was wrenched by a sudden compunction, and asked Pauline if he should not go and tell Margaret.

Guy went up the companion and asked Margaret if she were particularly anxious to be alone. She seemed to pull herself from a day-dream, as she turned to assure him she did not at all particularly want to be alone. Guy announced his good news, and Margaret offered him her slim hand with a kind of pathetic grace that moved him very much.

"I think you deserve it," she said. "For you've both been so sweet to me all this fortnight. I expect you think I don't notice, but I do ... always."

"Margaret," said Guy. "If this summer Pauline and I have seemed to run away from people...."

"Oh, but you have," Margaret interrupted. "I don't think I should find excuses, if I were you, for perhaps it's natural."

"I've fancied very often," he said, "that you've thought we were behaving selfishly."

"I think all lovers are selfish," she answered. "Only in your case you began in such an idyllic way that I thought you were going to be a wonderful exception. Guy, I do most dreadfully want you not to spoil in any way the perfectly beautiful thing that Pauline and you in love is. You won't, will you?"

"Have I yet?" asked Guy in rather a dismayed voice.

"Do you want me to be frank? Yes, of course you do, and anyway I must be frank," said Margaret. "Well, sometimes you have—I don't mean in wanting always to be alone or in asking her in to Plashers Mead to say good-night. No, I don't mean in those ways so much. Of course they make me feel a little sad, but smaller things than that make me more uneasy."

"Oh, no, I wasn't thinking of that," said Margaret. "I think in fact you're right to stay here and keep at what you're trying to do. If it was ever worth doing, it must be doubly worth doing now. Oh, no, the only criticism I shall make is of something so small that you'll wonder how I can think it even worth mentioning. Guy, you know the photograph of Pauline which Mother used to have and which she gave you?"

Guy nodded.

"Well, I happened to see it on the table by your bunk, and I wonder why you've taken it out of its simple little wooden frame and put it in a silver one?"

Guy was taken aback, and when he asked himself why he had done this, he could not find a reason. Now that Margaret had spoken of it, the consciousness of the exchange flooded him with shame as for an unforgivable piece of vandalism. Why indeed had he bought that silver frame and put the old wooden frame away, and where was the old wooden frame? In one of the drawers in his desk, he thought; resolving this very night to restore it to the photograph and fling the usurper into the river.

"I can't think why I did," he stammered to Margaret.

"You've no idea how much this has worried me," she said. "I never had any doubts about your appreciation of Pauline."

"And now you have," said Guy, biting his lip with mortification.

The landscape fading from the stern of the barge oppressed him with the sadness of irreparable acts that are committed heedlessly, but after which nothing is ever quite the same. He wished he could tear to pieces that silver frame.

It was very well to be forgiven like this, Guy thought, but the memory of his blunder was still hot upon his cheek and he felt a deep humiliation at the treachery of his taste. He had meant, when he came here to talk to Margaret, to ask her about herself and Richard, to display a captivating sympathy and restore to their pristine affection her relations with him, which latterly had seemed to diverge somewhat from one another. Now haunted by that silver frame, which with every moment of thought appeared more and more insistently the vile stationer's gewgaw that it was, Guy did not dare to approach Margaret in the security of an old intimacy.

It was she, however, with her grace who healed the wound.

"You're not hurt with me for speaking about that little thing?" she asked. "You see, you are in a way my brother."

"Margaret, you are a dear!"

And then recurred to him as if from Ladingford Manor the lines of Christina Rossetti, which he half whispered to her:

August

PAULINE and Guy with their formal engagement in sight were careful to give no excuse for a postponement by abusing their privileges. The river was now much overgrown with weeds, and in the last week of July rough weather set in which kept them in the Rectory a good deal on the occasions when they met. Guy too was harder at work than he had been all the Summer. The fact of being presently engaged in the eyes of the world was sufficiently exciting for Pauline to console her for the shorter time spent with Guy. Moreover she was so grateful to her family for not opposing the publication of the engagement that she tried particularly to impress them with the sameness of herself, notwithstanding her being in love with Guy. It happened therefore that the old manner of existence at the Rectory reasserted itself for a while; the music in the evenings, the mornings in the garden, everything indeed that could make the family suppose that she was set securely in the heart of their united life.

"When you and Margaret marry," Monica announced, one afternoon when the three sisters were in their nursery, "I really think I shall become a nun."

"But we can't all leave Father and Mother," Pauline exclaimed shocked at the deserted prospect.

"Now isn't that like people in love?" said Monica.

"Ah, but anyway I shall only be living at Plashers Mead," Pauline went on. "So they won't be left entirely alone."

"Margaret, you will marry. I can't think why you talk like that. If you don't intend to marry Richard, you ought to tell him so now, and not keep him any longer in uncertainty."

Pauline realized that Margaret did not like this direct attack, but it was so rarely that Margaret made it possible even to allude to Richard that she had to take the opportunity.

"I don't think I've interfered much with you and Guy," said Margaret. "Is it necessary that you should settle my affairs?"

"Oh, don't speak so unkindly to me, Margaret. I'm not trying to interfere. And anyway you do criticize Guy and me. Both you and Monica criticize us."

"Only when you tell us we don't understand about love."

"Well, you don't."

"All of us don't want to be in love quite so obviously as you," said Margaret. "And Monica agrees with me."

Monica nodded.

"Well, it's my character," said Pauline. "I always knew that when I did fall in love, I should fall dreadfully deep in love. I don't want to be thinking all the while about my personal dignity. I adore Guy. Why shouldn't I show it? Margaret loves Richard, but simply because she's so self-conscious she can't bear to show it. You call me morbid, Margaret, but I call you much more morbid than me."

Pauline tried to recapture more of the old interests of life at Wychford, and she was particularly attentive to Miss Verney, going often to see her in the little house at the top of the hill and sitting with her in the oblong garden whenever the August sun showed itself.

"I'm sure I'm sorry it's going to be a protracted engagement," said Miss Verney. "They are apt to place a great strain upon people. I'm sure when I read in The Times all about people's wills, though I always feel a trifle vulgar and inquisitive when I do so, I often say to myself 'Well, really, it seems a pity that some people should have so much more money than is quite necessary.' Only yesterday evening I read of a gentleman called Somethingheim who left £507,106 14s. and some odd pence, and really, I thought to myself, how much nicer it would have looked without the seven thousand one hundred and six pounds fourteen shillings and odd pence. And really I had quite a fanciful time imagining that I received a letter presenting it to me on account of some services my father rendered at Sebastopol, which at the time were overlooked. Seven thousand pounds I thought I would present to you and Mr. Guy Hazlewood, if you would allow me; a hundred pounds to the church; six pounds I had the idea of devoting to the garden; and the fourteen shillings and sevenpence, I remember now it was sevenpence, I thought would make such a pleasant surprize for my servant Mabel, who is really a most good-hearted girl, tactful with the cats and not too fond of young men."

"How sweet of you, Miss Verney, to think of such a nice present," said Pauline, who as she watched the old maid's grave air of patronage began almost to believe that the money had been given to her.

"And Guy has some money—£150 or £115 or it may be only £50."

"Let us call it a hundred pounds," said Miss Verney. "For it would be more prudent not to exaggerate. £380 a year. And I've no doubt the Rector on his side would be able to manage twenty pounds. £400 a year. Surely a very nice little sum on which to marry. Oh, certainly quite a pleasant little sum."

"Only the gentleman hasn't given you the seven thousand pounds," said Pauline.

"No, exactly, he has not. That's just where it is," Miss Verney agreed.

"But even if he hasn't," said Pauline, springing up and kissing her, "that doesn't prevent your being my dear Miss Verney; and so, thank you seven times for every pound you were going to give me."

Miss Verney stopped and stared out of her window: all about the room the cats were purring in the sunbeams: Pauline had a dozen plans racing through her mind for finding William and bringing him back like Peter in Mrs. Gaskell's book. She was just half-way up the hill with fluttering heart, longing to see Miss Verney's joy at the return of her William ... when tea tinkled in and the dream vanished.

When Pauline told Guy about Miss Verney's seven thousand pounds he was rather annoyed and said he was sorry that he and she were already an object of charity in Wychford.

"Oh, Guy," she protested, "you mustn't take poor Miss Verney too seriously; but it was so sweet of her to want to set us up with an income."

"Oh, Guy dear, don't look so cross. Please don't be cross and dreadfully in earnest about anything so stupid as money."

"I feel everybody will be pitying you for becoming engaged to a penniless pretender like me," he sighed.

"Don't be so stupid, Guy. If they pity anybody, they'll pity you for having a wife so utterly vague about practical things as I am. But I won't be, Guy, when we're married."

"Oh, my own, I wish we were married now. God! I wish, I wish we were!"

He had clasped her to him, and she drew away. Guy begged her pardon for swearing: but really she had drawn away because his eyes were so bright and wild that she was momentarily afraid of him.

August kept wet and stormy; but on the nineteenth, the day before Guy's birthday and the vigil of their betrothal, the sun came out with the fierceness of late Summer. Pauline went with Margaret and Monica for a walk in the cornfields, because she and Guy, although it was one of their trysting days, had each resolved to keep it strictly empty of the other's company, so that after a kind of fast they should meet on the great day itself with a deeper welcome. Pauline made a wreath of poppies for Margaret and for Monica a wreath of cornflowers; but her sisters could find no flower that became Pauline on this vigil, nor did she mind, for to-morrow was beckoning to her across the wheat and she gladly went ungarlanded.

"I wonder why I feel as if this were our last walk together," said Margaret.

"Oh, Margaret, how can you say a horrid thing like that," Pauline exclaimed; and to-morrow drooped before her in the dusty path.

Pauline vowed she would go home, not caring on whose wheat she trampled, if Margaret talked any more like that.

"I can't think why you want to make me sad," she protested. "What difference after all will this announcement of our engagement bring? I shall wear a ring, that's all!"

"But everybody will know you belong to Guy," said Margaret, "instead of to all of us."

"Oh, my dears, my dears," Pauline vowed. "I shall always belong to you as well. Don't make me feel unhappy."

"You don't really feel unhappy," said Monica in her wise way. "Because every morning I can hear you singing to yourself long before you ought to be awake."

Then her sisters kissed her, and through the golden cornfields they walked silently home.

When Pauline was in bed that night her mother lingered after Margaret and Monica had left her room.

"Are you glad, darling, you are going to give Guy such a charming birthday present to-morrow?" she asked.

"It's your present," said Pauline. "Because I couldn't possibly give myself unless you wanted me to. You know that, don't you, Mother? You do know that, don't you?"

"I want you to be my happy Pauline," her mother whispered. "And I think that with Guy you will be my happy Pauline."

"Oh, Mother, I shall, I shall. I love him so. Mother, what about Father? He simply won't say anything to me. To-day I helped him with transplanting, and I've been helping a lot lately ... with the daffodil bulbs when we came back from Ladingford, and all sorts of things. But he simply won't say a word."

"Oh, Mother, tell me what ring it is that Guy has found for me."

"It's charming ... charming ... charming," said her mother enthusiastically.

"Oh, I won't ask, but I'm longing to see it. Mother, what do you think it will be? Oh, but you know, so I mustn't ask you to guess. Oh, I do hope Margaret and Monica will like it."

"It's charming ... charming ... and now go to sleep."

Her mother kissed her good-night and when she was gone, Pauline took from under her pillow the crystal ring.

"However nice the new one is," she said, "I shall always love you best, you secret ring."

Then she got out of bed and took from her desk the manuscript book bound with a Siennese end-paper of shepherds and shepherdesses and rosy bowers, that was to be her birthday present to him.

"What poetry will he write in you about me, you funny empty book?" she asked, and inscribed it: