er, when the definite offer came he refused it. This
happened at the end of his visit to London when his money was running
out and when he had to be going back to Wychford to live somehow on
credit, until the Michaelmas quarter replenished his overdrawn account.
Before he left town he paid a visit to Mr. Worrall and told him that he
wanted his poems to appear anonymously. In fact, if it were not for
hurting the Rector's feelings he would have stopped their publication
altogether.

At the end of a hot and dusty July, and about a week before the Lammas
wedding of Margaret and Richard, Guy came back to Plashers Mead. The
immediate effect of seeing again the place which was now associated in
his mind with interminable difficulties was to make him resolute to
clarify the situation once and for all, to clarify it so completely that
there could never again be a repetition of that night in June. His
absence had been in the strictest sense an interlude, and all the
letters which marked to each the existence of the other had been but
conventional forms of love and comfortable postponements of reality.
When he met Pauline, Guy felt that he met her to all intents directly
after that dreadful night, with only this difference, that owing to the
time they had had for repose he could now say things that six weeks ago
he could not have said. He had arrived at Wychford for lunch, and as a
matter of course they were to be together that afternoon. Ordinarily on
such a piping July day he would have proposed the river for their
converse, and it was a sign of how near at hand he felt their last time
on the river that he proposed a walk instead.

Guy was aware of wanting to take Pauline to some place that was neither
hallowed nor cursed by past hours, and, avoiding familiar ways, they
reached a barren, cup-shaped field shut off from the road by a spinney
of firs that offered such a dry and draughty shade as made the field
even in the hot sun of afternoon more tolerable. They sat down on the
sour stony land among the rag-wort and teazles and feverfew. Summer had
burnt up this abandoned pasturage, and while they sat in silence Guy
rattled from the rank umbels of fool's-parsley and hemlock the
innumerable seeds that would only profit the rankness of another year.

"Well?" he said at last.

Pauline looked at him questioningly, and he felt impatient to be sitting
here on this sour stony land, and wondered how for merely this he could
have refus