ine's mother and
sisters for their own pleasure in embroidery, so that the lovers were,
as it might be, carried about from room to room. Sometimes, indeed, when
Guy came to the Rectory, there was a pretense of leaving him and Pauline
alone; but mostly they were in the company of the others, and Guy was
now as deep in the family life as if he were a son of the house. Since
he and Pauline never went for walks together, perhaps Wychford
speculation had died down--at any rate there was no gossip to disturb
Mrs. Grey; although, as she had by now given up the theory of a sort of
engagement, yet without consenting to anything in the shape of a final
announcement, it might not have mattered much.

Meanwhile, it began to dawn on Guy that the time was coming when he
would have to make up his mind to do something definite, and on these
bleak mornings of early March, as he watched the scanty snowflakes
withering against the panes, he asked himself if there was any
justification for staying on at Plashers Mead in the new circumstances
of his life there. At night, however, when the wind piped and whistled
round the house, he used to dream upon the firelight and shrink from
the idea of abandoning all that Plashers Mead had stood for and all that
now still more it must stand for in the future. If only a plan could be
devised by which the house were secured against sacrilege; and
half-fantastically he began to imagine a monastic academy for poets, of
which he would be Warden. Perhaps Michael Fane would like this idea, and
since he had money he might come forward with an offer of endowment.
Then he and Pauline could be married; for L150 a year would be an ample
income, if there were no rent to pay and no wages. He, of course, would
earn his living as superintendent of the academic discipline; and
really, as he dreamed over his plan, such an establishment would be an
admirable corollary to Oxford. It might gain even a sort of official
recognition from the university. Plainly some sort of institution was
wanted where in these commercial days young writers could retreat to
learn their craft less suicidally than by journalism. What should he
call his academy? With marriage as the reason for inventing this
economy, he could hardly give it too monastic a complexion. The louder
the wind beat against the house, the more feasibly in the lamplit quiet
within did the scheme present itself; and Michael Fane, who was always
searching for an object in