e isn't
very much difference."

For a long while they sat by the edge of the stream in their fragrant
seclusion.

"Dearest," Pauline sighed, "why can I listen to you all day, and yet
whenever anybody else talks to me why do I feel as if I were only half
awake?"

"Because even when you're not with me," said Guy, "you're still really
with me. That's why. You see, you're still listening to me."

This was a pleasant explanation; but Pauline was anxious to be reassured
about what Margaret had hinted was a deterioration in her character
lately.

"Perhaps we are a little selfish. But we won't be, when we're married."

Guy had been scribbling on an envelope which he now handed to her; and
she read:

Mrs. Guy Hazlewood
Plashers Mead
Wychford
Oxon.

"Oh, Guy, you know I love to see it written; but isn't it unlucky to
write it?"

"I don't think you ought to be so superstitious," he scoffed.

She wished he were not obviously despising the weakness of her beliefs.
This was the mood in which she seemed farthest away from him; when she
felt afraid of his cleverness; and when what had been simple became
maddeningly twisted up like an object in a nightmare.

Yet worries that were so faint as scarcely to have a definite shape
could still be bought off with kisses; and always when she kissed Guy
they receded out of sight again, temporarily appeased.

June, which had come upon them unawares, drifted on towards Midsummer,
and the indolent and lovely month mirrored herself in the stream with
lush growth of sedges and grasses, with yellow water-lilies budding,
with starry crowfoot and with spongy reeds and weeds that kept the canoe
to a slow progress in accord with the season. At this time, mostly, they
launched their craft in the mill-stream, whence they glided under
Wychford bridge to the pool of an abandoned mill on the farther side.
Here they would float immotionable on the black water, surrounded by
tumble-down buildings that rose from the vivid and exuberant growth of
the thick-leaved vegetation flourishing against these cold and decayed
foundations. Pauline was always relieved when Guy with soundless paddle
steered the canoe away from these deeps. The mill-pool affected her with
the merely physical fear of being overturned and plunged into those
glooms haunted by shadowy fish, there far down to be strangled by weeds
the upper tentacles of which could be seen undulating finely to the
least quiver upon the face