no
kind of interest in Michael's engagement; would only begin to see again
the endless delays that hung so heavily round their marriage. Michael
was not at all in the way, for he spent all the time writing to his
lady-love, of whom he had told Guy really nothing; or he would sit in
the lengthening grass of the orchard and read books of poetry, the pages
of which used to wink with lucid reflection caught from the leaves of
the fruit-trees overhead.

Guy looked over his shoulder and saw that he was reading "The Statue and
the Bust":

So weeks grew months, years; gleam by gleam
The glory dropped from their youth and love,
And both perceived they had dreamed a dream;

"That poem haunts me," exclaimed Guy, with a shudder.

Where is the use of the lip's red charm,
The heaven of hair, the pride of the brow,
And the blood that blues the inside arm--

Unless we turn, as the soul knows how,
The earthly gift to an end divine?

"And yet I can't stop reading it," he sighed.

How do their spirits pass, I wonder,
Nights and days in the narrow room?

Still, I suppose, they sit and ponder
What a gift life was, ages ago,
Six steps out of the chapel yonder.

On this Summer morning the words wrote themselves in fire across his
brain.

"They light the way to dusty death," he sputtered, over and over again,
when he had left Browning to Michael and flung himself face downward in
the orchard grass.

In despair of what a havoc time was making of their youth and their
love, that very afternoon he begged Pauline to meet him again now in
these dark nights of early Summer, now when soon he would be going away
from her.

"Going away?" she echoed in alarm. "I suppose that's the result of your
friend's visit."

Guy, however, was not going to surrender again, and he insisted that
when a month had passed he would indeed be gone from Plashers Mead. It
was nothing to do with Michael Fane; it was solely his own determination
to put an end to his unprofitable dalliance.

"But your poems? I thought that when your poems were published
everything would be all right."

"Oh, my poems," he scoffed. "They're valueless!"

"Guy!"

"They're mere decoration. They are trifles."

"I don't understand you."

"I care for nothing but to be married to you. For nothing, do you hear?
Pauline, everything is to be subordinate to that. I would even write and
beg my father to take me as a junior usher at Fox Hall f