onstrativeness. If he did so the
sisters would always take an opportunity to draw him aside and explain
that it was only Pauline's perfection which made them so anxious for its
security. Indeed, they guarded her perpetually and with such a high
sense of the privilege of wardship that Guy always had to forgive them
at once. Moreover, he was so conscious of their magnanimity in
considering him as a lover that he was almost afraid to claim his right.

"Margaret," he said, one day, "I don't know how you can bear to
contemplate Pauline married. Why, when I think of myself, I'm simply
dumb before the--what word is there--audacity is much too pale and, oh,
what word is there?"

"I don't think I could contemplate her married to anybody but you," said
Margaret.

"But why me?"

"Why, because you are young enough to make love beautiful and right,"
Margaret told him. "And yet you seem old enough to realize Pauline's
exquisite nature. So that one isn't afraid of her being squandered for a
young man's experience."

"But I'm not rich," said Guy, deliberately leading Margaret on to
discuss for the hundredth time this topic of himself and Pauline.

"Pauline wouldn't be happy with riches. They would oppress her. She
isn't luxurious like me."

So round and round, backward and forward, on and on the debate would go,
until Margaret had arranged for Guy and Pauline a life so idyllic that
Shelley would scarcely have found a flaw in her conception.

Pauline, however demonstrative in the presence of her family, was still
shy when she was alone with her lover. Her mirth was turned to a
whisper, and her greatest eloquence was a speech of drooping silences
and of blushes rising and falling. Guy never tired of watching these
flowery motions that were the response of her cheeks to his love. Each
word he murmured was a wind to stir her countenance or ruffle her eyes,
so that they, too, responded with cloudy deeps and shadows and sudden
veilings.

Nothing more was mentioned of the practical side of the engagement, for
Mrs. Grey, Monica, and Margaret were all too delightfully enthralled
with the progress of an idyll that was to each of them her own secret
poem of Pauline in love; while as for the Rector, he remained outwardly
oblivious of the whole matter.

March came crashing into this peace without disturbing the simple
pattern into which the existence of Guy and Pauline had now resolved
itself--a pattern, moreover, that belonged to Paul