d when they reached the pallid lawn they
saw Margaret and Monica in their white coats disappearing among the
yew-trees by the entrance.

"There are your ghosts," said Guy, laughing.

Yet, though Guy scoffed at her fears, Pauline was not sure that she
would not have preferred a ghost to that disquieting passage of her
sisters without hail or comment. Yet perhaps, after all, they had not
seen her and Guy in that sinister small parlor.

"Shall we catch them up?" he asked.

And Pauline, with a breath of dismay, was conscious of an inclination to
pretend that they had not been here this afternoon. She discovered
herself, as it were, proposing to Guy that they should not overtake
Monica and Margaret. A secretiveness she had never known before had
seized her soul, and she hoped that their presence in the Abbey was
unknown. Guy divined at once that she did not want to overtake her
sisters, and he kept her under the trees, where they watched each
assault of the wind tearing at the little foliage that still remained.
He guided her tenderly away from the sight of the house; and they walked
along the broad path down through the shrubbery, meeting a rout of brown
and red and yellow leaves that swept by them. She clung to Guy's arm as
if this urgent and tumultuous wind had the power to sweep her, too, into
the confusion; such an affraying journey was life beginning to seem.
This ghastly elation of the October weather would not allow her breath
to examine the perplexity in which she had involved herself. She felt
that if the wind blew any louder she would have to scream out in
defiance of its violence or else surrender miserably and be whirled into
oblivion. A brown oak-leaf had escaped from the perishable host and was
palpitating in a fold of her sleeve like a hunted creature; but when
Pauline would have rescued it at the same moment a gust came roaring up
the walk under the hissing trees, and the driven leaf was torn from its
refuge and flung high into the air to join the myriads in their giddy
riot of death.

"Come away from here," she cried to Guy. "Come away or I shall go mad in
this wind."

He looked at her with a sort of judicial demeanor, as if he were in
doubt whether he ought not to reprove such excitement.

"It was really beginning to blow quite fiercely," he said, when they had
reached the comparative stillness of Abbey Lane.

Behind them Pauline still heard with terror and hatred the moaning of
the trees, and sh