She touched his hand gently and drew close to him, but only timidly; and as she made the movement a flight of goldfinches lighted upon the swaying thistle-down in the hollow of the waste land.

"Pauline! Pauline!" he cried, and would have kissed her pa.s.sionately, but she checked him:

"No, no, I just want to lean my head upon your shoulder for a little while."

Above her murmur he heard the rustle of the goldfinches' song in parting cadences upon the air, rising and falling; and looking down at Pauline in the sunlight, he felt that she was a wounded bird he should be cherishing.

AUGUST

The wedding of Richard and Margaret dreamed of for so long strung Pauline to a pitch of excitement that made her seem never more positively herself. She was conscious, as she gazed in the mirror on that Lammas morning, that the tired look at the back of her eyes had gone and that in her muslin dress sown with rosebuds she appeared exactly as she ought to have appeared in any prefiguration of herself in bridesmaid's attire. Feeling as she did in a way the princ.i.p.al architect of Richard's and Margaret's happiness, she was determined at whatever cost of dejection afterwards to bring to the completion of her design all the enthusiasm she had brought to its conception.

"Do you like me as a bridesmaid?" she asked Guy.

And he, with obviously eager welcome of the old Pauline, could not find enough words to say how much he liked her.

"Richard, of course, is wearing a tail-coat," she murmured.

"I sha'n't," he whispered, "when we are married. I shall wear tweeds, and you shall wear your white frieze coat ... the one in which I first saw you. How little you've changed in these two years!"

"Have I? I think I've changed such a lot. Oh, Guy, such a tremendous lot!"

He shook his head.

"My rose, if all roses could stay like you, what a world of roses it would be."

The wedding happened as perfectly as Pauline had imagined it would.

Margaret looked most beautiful with her slim white satin gown and her weight of dusky hair, while Richard marched about stiff and awkward, yet so radiant that almost more than any one it was he who inspired the ceremony with hymeneal triumph and carried it beyond the soilure of unmeaning tears, he and Pauline, whose laughter was the expression of the joyous air, since Margaret was too deeply occupied with herself to cast a single questioning look.

In the evening, when the diminished family sat in the drawing-room without going up-stairs to music, as a matter of course, Monica announced abruptly that at the end of the month she was going to be a novice in one of the large Anglican sisterhoods. It seemed as if she had most deliberately taken advantage of the general reaction in order that n.o.body might have the heart to combat her intention. Pauline and Mrs.

Grey gasped, but they had no arguments to bring forward against the idea, and when Monica had outlined the plan in her most precise manner they simply acquiesced in the decision as immutable.

That night, as Pauline lay awake with the excitement of the wedding still throbbing in her brain, the future from every side began to a.s.sail her fancy. It seemed to her since Margaret's marriage and Monica's decision to be a nun that she must be more than ever convinced of her absolute necessity to Guy's existence. Unless she were a.s.sured of this she had no right to leave her father and mother. No doubt at least a year would pa.s.s before she and Guy could be married, but, nevertheless, her decision must be made at once. He had not seemed to depend upon her so much when he was in London; his letters had no longer contained those intimate touches that formerly a.s.sured her of the intertwining of their lives. But it was not merely a question of letters, this att.i.tude of his that latterly was continually being more sharply defined. Somewhere their love had diverged, and whereas formerly she had always been able to comfort herself with the certainty that between them love was exactly equal, now instead she could not help fancying that she loved him more than he loved her. It would, of course, be useless to ask him the question directly, for he would evade an answer by declaring it was prompted by unreasonable jealousy. Yet was her jealousy so very unreasonable, and if it were unreasonable was not that another reason against their marriage?

Pauline tried to search in the past of their love for the occasion of the divergence. It must be her own fault. It was she who had often behaved foolishly and impetuously, who had always supposed that her mother and sisters knew nothing about love, who had been to Guy all through their engagement utterly useless. It was she who had stopped his becoming a schoolmaster to help his father, it was she who had discouraged him from accepting that post in Persia. As Pauline looked back upon these two years she saw herself at every cross-road in Guy's career standing to persuade him towards the wrong direction.

Then, too, recurred the dreadful problem of religion. It was she who had not resisted his inclination to laugh at what she knew was true. It was she who had most easily and most weakly surrendered, so that it was natural for him to treat her faith as something more conventional than real.

The worries surged round her like waves in the darkness, and the one anchor of hope she still possessed was dragging ominously. Oh, if she could but be sure that she was essential to his happiness, she would be able to conquer everything else. The loneliness of her father and mother, Guy's debts, the religious difficulties, the self-reproach for those moonlit nights upon the river, the jealousy of his friends, the fear of his poems' failure, his absence in London--all these could be overcome if only she were sure of being vital to Guy's felicity.

A dull Summer wind sent a stir through the dry leaves of the creepers, but the night grew hotter notwithstanding, and sleep utterly refused to approach her room.

Next day, when Guy came round to the Rectory, Pauline was so eager to hear the answer to her question that she would take no account of the jaded spirit of such a day as this after a wedding, and its natural influence on Guy's point of view.

All the afternoon, however, they helped the Rector with his bulbs, and no opportunity of intimate conversation occurred until after tea when they were sitting in the nursery. The wind, that last night had run with slow tremors through the leaves, was now blowing gustily, and banks of clouds were gathering--great clouds that made the vegetation seem all the more dry and stale as they still deferred their drench of rain.

"Guy, I don't want to annoy you, but is it really necessary that your poems should appear without your name?"

"Absolutely," he said, firmly.

"You don't think any of them are good?"

"Oh, some are all right, but I don't believe in them as I used to believe in them."

"Sometimes, my dearest, you frighten me with the sudden way in which you dispose of things.... They were important to you once, weren't they?"

"Of course. But they have outlived their date. I must do better."

She got up and went over to the window-seat, and when she spoke next she was looking at the wicket in the high gray wall.

"Guy, could I outlive my date?"

"Oh, dearest Pauline, I do beg you not to start problems this afternoon!

Of course not."

"Are you sure? Are you sure that when you are in London you won't find other girls more interesting than I am?"

"Even if temporarily I were interested in another girl, you may be quite sure that she would always be second to you."

"But you might be interested?" Pauline asked, breathlessly.

"I must be free if I'm going to be an artist."

"Free?" she echoed, slowly.

The cuckoo in the pa.s.sage struck seven, and Mrs. Grey came into the nursery to invite Guy to stay to dinner. All through the meal Pauline kept saying to herself, "free," "free," "free," and afterwards when her mother suggested a trio in the music-room, because they could no longer have quartets, and because soon they would not even have trios, Pauline played upon her violin nothing but that word "free," "free," "free." In the hall, when she kissed Guy good night, she had impulse to cling to him and pour out all her woes; but, remembering how often lately he had been the victim of her overwrought nerves, she let him go without an effort. For a little while she held the door ajar so that a thin shaft of lamplight showed his tall shape walking quickly away under the trees.

Why was he walking so quickly away from her? Oh, it was raining fast, and she shut the door. Up-stairs in her room she wrote to him:

Guy, you must forgive me, but I cannot bear the strain of this long engagement any more. I will go away with Miss Verney somewhere to-morrow so that you needn't hurry away from Plashers Mead before you intended. I meant to write you a long letter full of everything, but there isn't any more to say.

PAULINE.

Her mother found her sobbing over her desk that was full of childish things, and asked what was the matter.

"I've broken off my engagement," and wearily she told her some of the reasons, but never any reason that might have seemed to cast the least blame on him. Next morning very early came a note for her mother from Guy, in which he said he was leaving Plashers Mead in a couple of hours, and begged that she would not let Pauline be the one to go away.

EPIGRAPH

GUY