rmured.

"I sha'n't," he whispered, "when we are married. I shall wear tweeds,
and you shall wear your white frieze coat ... the one in which I first
saw you. How little you've changed in these two years!"

"Have I? I think I've changed such a lot. Oh, Guy, such a tremendous
lot!"

He shook his head.

"My rose, if all roses could stay like you, what a world of roses it
would be."

The wedding happened as perfectly as Pauline had imagined it would.
Margaret looked most beautiful with her slim white satin gown and her
weight of dusky hair, while Richard marched about stiff and awkward, yet
so radiant that almost more than any one it was he who inspired the
ceremony with hymeneal triumph and carried it beyond the soilure of
unmeaning tears, he and Pauline, whose laughter was the expression of
the joyous air, since Margaret was too deeply occupied with herself to
cast a single questioning look.

In the evening, when the diminished family sat in the drawing-room
without going up-stairs to music, as a matter of course, Monica
announced abruptly that at the end of the month she was going to be a
novice in one of the large Anglican sisterhoods. It seemed as if she had
most deliberately taken advantage of the general reaction in order that
nobody might have the heart to combat her intention. Pauline and Mrs.
Grey gasped, but they had no arguments to bring forward against the
idea, and when Monica had outlined the plan in her most precise manner
they simply acquiesced in the decision as immutable.

That night, as Pauline lay awake with the excitement of the wedding
still throbbing in her brain, the future from every side began to assail
her fancy. It seemed to her since Margaret's marriage and Monica's
decision to be a nun that she must be more than ever convinced of her
absolute necessity to Guy's existence. Unless she were assured of this
she had no right to leave her father and mother. No doubt at least a
year would pass before she and Guy could be married, but, nevertheless,
her decision must be made at once. He had not seemed to depend upon her
so much when he was in London; his letters had no longer contained those
intimate touches that formerly assured her of the intertwining of their
lives. But it was not merely a question of letters, this attitude of
his that latterly was continually being more sharply defined. Somewhere
their love had diverged, and whereas formerly she had always been able
to comfort herself wi