MICHAEL FANE stayed on into June, and the fancy came to Pauline that he knew of these meetings with Guy at night. It enraged her with jealousy to think that he might have been taken into Guy's confidence so far and the prejudice against him grew more violent every day. She already had enough regrets for having given way to Guy's persuasion, and the memory of that last return at dawn to her cool reproachful room haunted her more bitterly when she thought of its no longer being a secret. The knowledge that Guy was soon going to leave Plashers Mead was another torment, for though in a way she was glad of his wanting to make the determined effort, she could not help connecting the resolve with his friend's visit, and in consequence of this her one desire was to upset the plan. The sight of Richard and Margaret progressing equably toward their marriage early in August also made her jealous, and she began unreasonably to ascribe to her sister an attitude of superiority that she allowed to gall her: and whenever Richard was praised by any of the family she could never help feeling now that the praise covered or implied a corresponding disparagement of Guy. With Monica she nearly quarrelled over religion, for though in her heart it occupied the old supreme place, her escapades at night, by the tacit leave they seemed to give Guy to presume that religion no longer counted as her chief resource, had led her for the first time to make herself appear outwardly indifferent. In fact she now dreaded going to church, because she felt that if she once surrendered to the holy influence she would suffer again all the remorse of the winter that now by desperate deferment she was able for a little while to avoid. On top of all this vexation of soul she was angry with Guy because he seemed unable to realize that they were both walking on the edge of an abyss, and that all this abandonment of themselves to the joy of the fugitive season was a vain attempt to cheat fate. At such an hour she was naturally jealous that a friend's private affairs should occupy so much of Guy's attention, when he himself was walking blindly toward the doom of their love that now sometimes in flashes of horrible clarity she beheld at hand. Guy, however, persisted in trying to force Michael upon her: the jealousy such attempts fostered made her more passionate when she was alone with him, and this, as all the while she dreadfully foresaw, heaped up the reckoning that her conscience would presently have to pay.

One afternoon she and Margaret and Monica went to tea at Plashers Mead, when to her sharp annoyance she found herself next to Guy's friend. She made up her mind at the beginning of the conversation that he was criticizing her and, feeling shy and awkward, she could only reply to him in gasps and monosyllables and blushes. He seemed to her the coldest person she had ever known: he seemed utterly without emotion or sympathy: he must surely be the worst friend imaginable for Guy. He took no interest in anything apparently; and then suddenly he definitely revealed himself as the cause of Guy's ambition to conquer London.

"I think Guy ought to go away from here," he was saying. "I told him when he first took this house that he would be apt to dream away all his time here. You must make him give it up, Miss Grey. He's such an extraordinarily brilliant person that it would be terrible if he let himself do nothing in the end. Of course he's been lucky to meet you, and that's kept him alive, but now he ought to go to London. He really ought."

Pauline hated herself for the way in which she was gasping out her monosyllabic agreement with all this; but she did not feel able to argue with Michael Fane. He disconcerted her by his air of severe judgment, and however hard she tried she could not contradict him. Then suddenly in a rage with herself and with him she began to talk nonsense at the top of her voice, rattling on until her sisters looked up at her in surprize, while Michael evidently embarrassed scarcely answered. At last the uncomfortable visit came to an end, and as she walked back with Guy, while the others went in front, she began to inveigh against the friend more fiercely than ever.

"My dear, I can't think why you have him to stay with you. He hates your being engaged to me...."

"Oh, nonsense," Guy interrupted rather crossly.

"He does, he does; and he hates your staying down here. He says Plashers Mead is ruining you and that you ought to go to London. Now, you see, I know why you want to go there."

"Really, Pauline, you're talking nonsense. I'm going to London because I'm positive that your father and mother both think I ought to go. And I'm positive myself that I ought to go. I've been wrong to stay here all this time. I've done nothing to help forward our marriage. Look how nervous and ... how nervous and overwrought you've become. It's all my fault."

"How I hate that friend of yours!"

Guy looked up in astonishment at the fervour of her tone.

"And how he hates me," she went on.

"Oh, really, my dear child, you are ridiculous," Guy exclaimed petulantly. "Are you going to take up this attitude towards all my friends? You're simply horridly jealous, that's the whole matter."

Pauline did not quarrel now, because she thought it might gratify Michael Fane to see the discord he had created, but she treasured up her anger and knew that, when later she and Guy were alone, she would say whatever hard things now rested unsaid. Next morning Guy asked her if she would be very cross to hear that he was going to town for a night.

"With your friend?" she asked.

He nodded, and she turned away from him clouded blue eyes.

"It is unfair of you to hate Michael," he pleaded. "I told him you thought he was cold, and he said at once, 'do tell her I'm not cold, and say how lovely I think her.' He said you were very lovely and strange ... a fairy's child."

Still Pauline would not turn her head.

"I told him that you were indeed a fairy's child," Guy went on, "and I told him how sometimes I felt I should go off my head with the responsibility your happiness was to me. For indeed, Pauline, it is, it is a responsibility."

She felt she must yield when Guy spoke like that, but then unfortunately he began to talk about his friend again and sullen jealousy returned.

"Listen, Pauline. I'm going up to town because Michael wants me to see this girl he is going to marry. He was rather pathetic about her. It seems that ... well ... it's a sort of misalliance, and his people are angry about it, and really I must be loyal and go up to town and help him with ... well ... you see really all his friends have been unsympathetic about her."

"I expect they've every right to be," said Pauline.

"I do think you're unreasonable. I'm only going away for a night."

"Oh, go, go, go," she cried, and pulling herself free of his caress, she left him by the margin of the stream disconsolate and perplexed.

Pauline, when Guy had gone to London with his friend, began to fret herself with the fear that he would not come back, and she was very remorseful at the thought that if he did not she would be responsible. She half expected to get a letter next day to tell her of his determination to remain in town for good, and when no letter came she exaggerated still more all her fears and longed to send him a telegram to ask if he had arrived safely, railing at herself for having let him leave her without knowing where he was going to stay. By the following afternoon all the jealousy of Michael had been swallowed up in a passionate desire for Guy's return, and when about three o'clock she saw him coming through the wicket in the high grey wall her heart beat fast with relief. She said not a word about Guy's journey, nor did she even ask if his friend had come back with him. She cared for nothing but to show by her tenderness how penitent she was for that yesterday which had torn such a rent in the perfection of their love. Guy was visibly much relieved to find that her jealous fit had passed away, and when she asked for an account of his journey he gave it to her most eagerly.

"Yesterday was rather tragic," he said. "We went to see this Lily Haden to whom Michael had engaged himself, and ... well ... it's impossible to explain to you what happened, but it was all very horrible and rather like a scene in a French play. Anyhow Michael is cured of that fancy, and now he talks of going out of England and even of becoming a monk. These extraordinary religious fads that succeed violent emotion of an utterly different kind! Personally I don't think the monkish phase will survive the disillusionment that's just as much bound to happen in religion as it was bound to happen over that girl."

"What was she like?" Pauline asked, resolving to appear interested in Michael.

"I never saw her," said Guy. "The tragedy took place 'off' in the Aristotelian manner."

"Oh, Guy, don't use such long words."

"Dear little thing, I wish you wouldn't ask any more about this girl. She is something quite outside your imagination; though I could make of her behaviour such a splendid lesson for you, when you think you have behaved dreadfully in escaping from your room for an hour or two of moonlight. Poor Michael! he's as scrupulous as you are, and it's rather ironical that you and he shouldn't get on. Puritans, both of you! Now there's another friend of mine, Maurice Avery, whom you'd probably like very much, and yet he isn't worth Michael's little finger."

"Did you see him yesterday?"

"Yes, we went round to his studio in Grosvenor Road. Oh, my dear, such a glorious room looking out over the river right into the face of the young moon coming up over Lambeth. A jolly old Georgian house. And at the back another long low window looking out over a sea of roofs to the sunset behind the new Roman cathedral. There were lots of people there, and a man was playing that Brahms sonata your mother likes so much. Pauline, you and I simply must go and live in Chelsea or Westminster and we can come back to Plashers Mead after the most amazing adventures. You would be such a rose on a London window-sill, or would you then be a tuft of London Pride, all blushes and bravery?"

"Bravery! Why I'm frightened to death by the idea of going to live in London. Oh, Guy, I'm frightened of anything that will break into our life here."

"But, dearest, we can't stay at Wychford for ever doing nothing. Read The Statue and the Bust if you want to understand the dread that lies cold on my heart sometimes. Think how already nearly twenty months have gone by since we met, and still we are in the same position. We know each other better and we are more in love than ever, but you have all sorts of worries at the back of your mind and I have all sorts of ambitions not yet fulfilled. Michael has at least managed to make a complete ass of himself, but what have I done?"

"Your poems ... your poems," she murmured despairingly. "Are your poems really no use? Oh, Guy, that seems such a cruel thing to believe."

Guy talked airily of what much more wonderful things he was going to write, and when he asked Pauline to meet him this very midnight on the river, she had to consent, because in the thought that he appeared to be drifting out of reach of her love she felt half distraught and would have sacrificed anything to keep him by her.

The June evening seemed of a sad uniform green, for the blossom of the trees was departed and the borders were not yet marching in Midsummer array. There was always a sadness about these evenings of early June, a sadness, and sometimes a threat when the wind blew loudly among the young foliage. Those gusty eves were almost preferable to this protracted and luminous melancholy in which the sinking crescent of the moon hung scarcely more bright than ivory. The pensive beauty was too much for Pauline, who wished that she could shut out the obstinate day and read by candlelight such a book as Alice in Wonderland until it was time to go to bed. Her white fastness, rose-bloomed by sunset as she dressed for dinner, reproached her intention of abandoning its shelter to-night, and she determined that this should really be the last escapade. There was no harm in what she had done of course, as Guy assured her, and yet there was harm in behaving so traitorously toward that narrow white bed, toward pious wide-eyed Saint Ursula and Tobit's companionable angel.

The languor of the evening was heavy upon all the family: Monica was the only one who had the energy to go to her instrument. She played Chopin, and the austerity of her method made the ballades and the nocturnes more dangerously sweet. Gradually the melodies lulled most of Pauline's fears and charmed her to look forward eagerly to the velvet midnight when she with Guy beside her would float deep into such caressing glooms. After Monica had played them all into drowsiness, Pauline had to wait until the last sound had died away in the house and the illumination of the last window had faded from the bodeful night that was stroking her window with invitation to come forth.

Twelve o'clock clanged from the belfry, and Pauline opened her bedroom door to listen. She had put on her white frieze coat, for although the night was warm the wearing of such outdoor garb gave a queer kind of propriety to the whole business, and at the far end of the long corridor she saw herself in the dim candlelight mirrored like a ghost in the Venetian glass. From the heart of the house the cuckoo calling midnight a minute or two late made her draw back in alarm, and not merely in alarm, but also rather sentimentally, as if by her action she were going to offend that innocent bird of childhood. She wondered why to-night she felt so sensitive beforehand, since usually the regret had followed her action; but promising herself that to-night should indeed be the last time she would ever take this risk, she crept on tip-toe down the stairs.

In the glimmering starshine Pauline could see Guy standing by the wicket in the high grey wall, a remote and spectral form against the blackness all around him where the invisible trees gathered and hoarded the gloom. She sighed with relief to find that the arms with which so gently he enfolded her were indeed warm with life. Her passage over the lawn had been one long increasing fear that the shape, so indeterminate and motionless that awaited her approach, might not be Guy in life, but a wan image of what he had been, a demon lover, a shadow from the cave of death.

"Guy, my darling, my darling, it is you! Oh, I was so frightened that when I came close you wouldn't really be there."

She leaned half sobbing upon his shoulder.

"Pauline, don't talk so loud. I only did not come across the lawn to meet you for fear of attracting attention."

"Let me go back now," she begged, "now that I've seen you."

But Guy soon persuaded her to come with him through the wicket and out over the paddock where the grass whispered in their track, until at the sight of the canoe's outline she lost her fears and did not care how recklessly she explored the deeps of the night.

In silence they travelled upstream under the vaulted willows: under the giant sycamore whose great roots came writhing out of the darkness above the sheen of the water: under Wychford bridge whose cold breath dripped down in icy beads upon the thick swirl beneath: and then out through starshine across the mill-pool. Pauline held her breath while around their course was a sound of water sucking at the vegetation, gurgling and lapping and chuckling against the invisible banks.

"The Abbey stream?" murmured Guy.

She scarcely breathed her consent, and the canoe tore the growing sedge like satin as it bumped against the slope of the bank. Pauline felt that she was protesting with her real self against the part she was playing in this dream: but the dream became too potent and she had to help Guy to push the canoe up through the grass and down again into the quiet water beyond. It was much blacker here on account of the overhanging beeches, but continually Pauline strained through the darkness for a sight of the deserted house the windows of which seemed to follow with blank and bony gaze their progress.

"Guy, let's hurry for I can see the Abbey in the starlight," she exclaimed.

"You have better eyes than mine if you can," he laughed. "My sweet, your face from where I'm sitting is as filmy as a rose at dusk. And even if you can see the Abbey, what does it matter? Do you think it's going to run down the hill and swim after us?"

Pauline tried to laugh, but even that grotesque picture of his evoked a new terror, and huddled among the cushions she sat with beating heart, shuddering when the leaves of the great beech-trees fondled her hair. She looked back to her own white fastness and began to wonder if she had left the candle burning there: it seemed to her that she had and that perhaps presently, perhaps even now, somebody was coming to see why it was burning. And still Guy took her farther up the stream. How empty her room would look and what a chill would fall upon the sister or mother that peeped in.

"Oh, take me back," she cried.

But still the canoe cleft the darkness and now, emerging from the cavernous trees, they glided once again into starshine infinitely outspread, through which with the dim glister of a snake the stream coiled and uncoiled itself.

Guy grasped at the reeds and drew the canoe close against the bank, making it fast with two paddles plunged into the mud. Then he gathered her to him so that her head rested upon his shoulder and her lips could meet his. Thus enfolded for a long while she lay content. The candle in her room burned itself out and nothing could disturb her absence, no one could suppose that she was here on this starlit river. Scarcely indeed was she here except as in the midway of deepest sleep, resting between a dream and a dream. She might have stayed unvexed for ever if Guy had not begun to talk, for although at first his voice came softly and pleasantly out of the night and lulled her like a tune heard faintly in some far-off corner of the mind, minute by minute his accents became more real: suddenly, as her drowsed arm slid over the edge of the canoe into the water, she woke and began herself to talk and, as she talked, to shrink again from the vision of her whole life whether past or present or to come.

In this malicious darkness she wanted to hear more about that girl who had betrayed Michael Fane; she wanted to know things that before she had not even known were hidden. She pressed Guy with questions, and when he would not answer them she began to feel jealous even of unrevealed sin. This girl was the link between all those girls at whose existence in his own past Guy had once hinted. Michael Fane appeared like the tempter and Guy like his easy prey. Distortions of the most ordinary, the most trifling incidents piled themselves upon her imagination; and that visit to London assumed a ghastly and impenetrable mysteriousness.

Guy vainly tried to laugh away her fancies: faster and still faster the evil cohorts swept up against her, almost as tangible as bats flapping into her face.

"Don't talk so loud," said Guy crossly. "Do remember where we are."

Then she reproached him with having brought her here. She felt that he deserved to pay the penalty, and defiantly she was talking louder and louder until Guy with feverish strokes urged the canoe downstream toward home.

"For God's sake, keep quiet," he begged. "What has happened to you?"

That he should be frightened by her violence made her more angry. She threw at him the wildest accusations, how that through him she had ceased to believe in God, to care for her family, for her honour, for him, for life itself.

"Pauline, will you keep quiet. Are you mad to behave like this?"

He drove the canoe into a thorn-bush, so that it should not upset, and he seized her wrist so roughly that she thought she screamed. There was something splendid in that scream being able to disquiet the night, and in an elation of woe she screamed again.

"Do you know what you're doing?" he demanded.

She found herself asking Guy if she were screaming, and when she knew that at last she could hurt him, she screamed more loudly.

"You used to laugh at me when I said I might go mad," she cried. "Now do you like it? Do you like it?"

"Pauline, I beg you to keep quiet. Pauline, think of your people. Will you promise to keep quiet, if I take you out of this thorn-bush?"

He began to laugh not very mirthfully, and that he could laugh infuriated her so much that she was silent with rage, while Guy disentangled the canoe from the thorn-bush and more swiftly than before urged it toward home.

When they reached the grassy bank that divided the Abbey stream from the mill-pool, she would not get out of the canoe to walk to the other side.

"I cannot cross that pool," she said. "Guy, don't ask me to. I've been afraid of it always. If we cross it to-night, I shall drown myself."

He tried to argue with her. He pleaded with her, he railed at her and finally he laughed at her, until she got out and watched him launch the canoe on the farther side and beckon through the tremulous sheen to her. Wildly she ran down the steep bank and flung herself into the water.

"Where am I? Guy, where am I?"

"Well, at present you're lying on the grass, but where you've been or where I've been this last five minutes.... Pauline, are you yourself again?"

"Guy, my dearest, my dearest, I don't know why...."

She burst into tears.

"My dearest, how wet you are," she sobbed, stroking his drenched sleeve.

"Well, naturally," he said with a short laugh. "Look here, it was all my fault for bringing you out, so don't get into a state of mind about yourself, but you can't go back in the canoe. My nerves are still too shaky. I can lift you over the wall behind the mill, and we must go back to the Rectory across the street. Come, my Pauline, you're wet, you know. Oh, my own, my sweet, if I could only uncount the hours."

Pauline would never have reached home but for Guy's determination. It was he who guided her past the dark entries, past the crafty windows of Rectory Lane, past the menacing belfry, past the trees of the Rectory drive. By the front door he asked her if she dared go upstairs alone.

"I will wait on the lawn until I see your candle alight," he promised.

She kissed him tragically and crept in. Her room was undisturbed, but in the looking-glass she saw a dripping ghost, and when she held her candle to the window, another ghost vanished slowly into the high grey wall. A cock crowed in the distance, and through the leaves of the wistaria there ran a flutter of waking sparrows.