ept where the stream lapped against the
barge and where very far off some rooks were cawing.

Guy and Pauline had resolved that they would give Margaret no chance of
calling them selfish during this fortnight; and since they were together
all the time, it was much easier now not to wish to escape from
everybody. The first week went by in such a perfection of delight as Guy
had scarcely thought was possible. Indeed, it remained ultimately
unimaginable, this dream-life on the _Naiad_. A pleasant woman in a
sunbonnet came to cook breakfast and dinner; and Pauline and Margaret
went to Ladingford and bought sunbonnets, a pink one for Pauline and for
Margaret one of watchet blue. In the fresh mornings Guy and the sisters
wandered idly over the meads; but in the afternoon Margaret generally
read a book in the shade while Guy and Pauline went for walks, walks
that ended always in sitting by the river's edge and telling each other
the tale of their love. The nights with a clear moon waxing to the full
were entrancing. There was a small piano on the barge, the notes of
which had been brought by damp almost to the timbre of an exhausted
spinet. It served, however, for Mrs. Grey to accompany Pauline while
she played on a violin simple tunes. Guy used to lie back on the deck
and count the stars above Pauline's pavans and galliards; then from the
silence that followed he would see her coming, shadowy, light as the
dewfall, to sit close beside him, to sit, her hand in his, for an hour
while the moon climbed the sky and the fern-owls croaked in their
hunting. And as the romantic climax of the day, it was wonderful to fall
asleep with the knowledge that Pauline slept nearer to him than she had
ever slept before.

"Guy ought to go and see the Lamberts at the Manor," Mrs. Grey announced
at the end of the second week. "I've written to Mrs. Lambert. It will be
interesting for him."

Guy was thrilled by the notion of visiting Ladingford Manor, which had
been one of the great fortresses of romance held against the devastating
commercial morality of the Victorian prime with its science and
sciolism, and which possessed already some of the fabulous appeal of the
medieval songs and tapestries John Lambert had created there. An
invitation came presently to walk over any afternoon. Margaret said at
first she would not go; but Guy, who was in a condition of excited
reverence, declared she must come; and so the three of them set out
across a path