d the letter for you._

The sentence died out in faint ink that seemed to show forth the whisper
in which it had been written. For Guy the tumble-down letters were
written in fire; and with the treasure in his heart of that small
sentence, read a hundred times, he did not know how he should endure ten
long days without Pauline, and in this old college garden, on this
sedate and academic lawn, he cried out that he adored her as if indeed
she were beside him in this laylocked air. At the sound of his voice the
birds close at hand were all silent; they might have stopped to listen.
Then a green finch called, "Sweet! sweet!" whose gentle and persistent
proclamation was presently echoed by all the other birds twittering
together again in the confused raptures of their Spring.

The days with Michael at St. Giles went by slowly enough, and their
fairness was a wasted boon. Guy wrote many long letters to Pauline and
received from her another letter in which she began with "_My dearest_,"
as he had begged her. Yet when he read the herald vocative, he wished he
had not tried to alter that old abrupt opening, for never again would
she write in the faint ink of shyness such a sentence as had tumbled
down the back of her first letter.

Michael seemed to divine that he was in love, and Guy wondered why he
could not tell him about it. Once or twice he nearly brought himself to
the point, but the thought of describing Pauline kept him mute; Michael
must see her first. The canoe would be ready at the end of the week, and
Guy announced he should paddle it up to Wychford, traveling from the
Isis to the upper Thames, and from the upper Thames turning aside at
Oldbridge to follow the romantic course of the Greenrush even to his own
windows.

"Rather fun," said Michael, "if the weather stays all right."

"By Jove!" Guy exclaimed, "I believe it was at Oldbridge Inn that I
first met you."

"On May Day three years ago," Michael agreed.

And, thought Guy, with a compassionate feeling for mere friendship, what
a much more wonderful May Day should be this when Pauline was twenty.
There was now her birthday present to buy, and Guy set out on the quest
of it with as much exaltation as Percival may have sought the Holy
Grail. He wished it were a ring he could buy for her; and indeed
ultimately he could not resist a crystal set on a thin gold circlet that
she, his rose of girls, would wear like a dewdrop. This ring, however,
could not be his f