re well received, my
father must acknowledge my right to be here, and if he once admits that,
what barrier can there be to our wedding?"

Pauline told him how much during the last month the distant prospect of
their marriage had begun to weigh upon her, but now since that parcel
had been left at the post-office, she said she would always talk of
their wedding because that was such a much less remote word than
marriage.

"Come out to-night," said Guy, suddenly.

She put her hand on his arm.

"Guy, don't ask me again."

He was penitent at once, and full of promises never to ask her again to
do anything that might cause an instant's remorse. They had reached the
hall of the Rectory, and in the shadows Pauline held him to her heart,
suddenly caught in the flood of tenderness that a wife might have for a
husband to whose faults she could be indulgent by the measure of his
greater virtues kept, as it might be, for her alone.

JANUARY

Guy, as soon as he had sent off the poems to a publisher, was much less
violently driven by the stress of love, which latterly had urged him
along so wayward a course. He began to acquire a perspective and to lose
some of that desperately clinging reliance upon present joys. The need
of battling against an uncertain future had brought him to the pitch of
madness at the thought of the hours of Pauline's company that must be
wasted; but now when to his sanguine hopes marriage presented itself as
at last within sight, sometimes even seeming as close as the Fall of
this new year, he was anxious to set Pauline upon more tranquil waters,
lest she too should like himself be the prey of wild imaginations that
might destroy utterly one untempered by any except the gentler emotions
of a secluded life. Her mother and sisters, whom he had come to regard
as hostile interpreters of convention, took on again their old features
of kindliness and grace; and he was able to see without jealous torments
how reasonable their attitude had been throughout; nay, more than
reasonable, how unworldly and noble-hearted it had been in confiding
Pauline to the care of one who had so few pretensions to deserve her. He
upbraided himself for having by his selfishness involved Pauline in the
complexities of regrets for having done something against her judgment;
and in this dreary rain of January, free from the burden of uncompleted
labor, he now felt a more light-hearted assurance than he had known
since the be