nd Pauline away for a month
... with Miss Verney ... yes ... charming, charming plan ... and you
must make arrangements at once about your poems ... and then perhaps you
could give them to Pauline for her birthday...."

"But I don't think the Rector ought to pay for them," Guy objected.

"The Rector wants to pay for them. But, of course, he won't say anything
about it, and you will have to make the arrangements yourself."

"You're all so good to me, and I feel such a fraud," said Guy.

"You'd better make arrangements with the man you sent them to first ...
and Pauline needn't know anything about it ... and I sha'n't say I've
persuaded you not to go to China ... or else she will be worried ...
she's looking rather pale.... I think two or three weeks by the seaside
... Lyme Regis perhaps or Cromer ... Lyme Regis, I think, because the
trains to Folkstone have been torn out ... yes ... charming, charming."

After lunch Guy told Pauline in the garden that he had decided not to
accept the post he had been offered, and she was so obviously overjoyed
at his decision that he no longer had the heart to feel the slightest
disappointment.

"Guy, I've been so stupid," she told him. "I've depressed you without
any reason, but I will come back from Scarborough quite well."

Guy began to laugh.

"Oh, why are you laughing?"

"Dearest, because I cannot make out where you really are going."

"Scarborough, because Miss Verney has chosen Scarborough."

They talked for a while of the letters that each would write to the
other, and of what a Summer should follow that short parting, when every
day they would be together and when perhaps even such days as those at
Ladingford might come again.

"And you won't worry about anything all this time you're away?" Guy
asked.

"I won't, indeed I won't."

Guy went home to find a telegram from Comeragh saying that Sir George
Gascony had got appendicitis and would not be going to Persia for a
month or two at least. Yet he did not mention this telegram at the
Rectory when next day he came to say good-by to Pauline, because he was
anxious to preserve the idea of his having vainly attempted to do
something, and when he sat alone in his orchard the same afternoon, he
had an emotion of something very near to relief that for a while there
would be no more heart-searchings and stress, no more misgivings and
reproaches and despairs. He was perfectly happy, sitting by himself in
the orchard and sta