Your own adoring
Pauline.
Guy wrote the little note to Pauline and to his father he wrote a long letter explaining that it was impossible to give up what he was doing to be a schoolmaster.
It was peerless weather when they set out in Godbold's wagonette on the nine miles to Ladingford. Guy was thrilled to be travelling like this with Mrs. Grey, Margaret and Pauline. The girls were in flowered muslin dresses, seeming more airy than he had ever thought them: and the luggage piled up beside Godbold had the same exquisite lightness, so that it appeared less like luggage than a store of birds' feathers. The thought of nearly having missed this summery pilgrimage made Guy catch his breath.
They arrived at Ladingford toward tea-time and found the barge lying by an old stone bridge about a mile away from the village. Apart from the spire of Ladingford church nothing conspicuously broke the horizon of that flat green country stretching for miles to a shadowy range of hills. Whichever way they looked, these meads extended with here and there willows and elms; close at hand was the quiet by-road that crossed the bridge and meandered over the low lands, as still and traffickless as the young Thames itself.
The Naiad was painted peacock blue; owing to the turreted poops the owner had superimposed and the balustrade with rail of gilt gadroons, it almost had the look of a dismasted Elizabethan ship.
"Anything more you'll want?" Godbold enquired.
"Nothing more, thank you, Mr. Godbold," said Mrs. Grey. "Charming ... charming ... such a pleasant drive. Good afternoon, Mr. Godbold."
The carrier turned his horse; and when the sound of the wagonette had died away, there was silence except where the stream lapped against the barge and where very far off some rooks were cawing.
Guy and Pauline had resolved that they would give Margaret no chance of calling them selfish during this fortnight; and since they were together all the time, it was much easier now not to wish to escape from everybody. The first week went by in such a perfection of delight as Guy had scarcely thought was possible. Indeed it remained ultimately unimaginable, this dream life on the Naiad. A pleasant woman in a sunbonnet came to cook breakfast and dinner; and Pauline and Margaret went to Ladingford and bought sunbonnets, a pink one for Pauline and for Margaret one of watchet blue. In the fresh mornings Guy and the sisters wandered idly over the meads; but in the afternoon Margaret generally read a book in the shade while Guy and Pauline went for walks, walks that ended always in sitting by the river's edge and telling each other the tale of their love. The nights with a clear moon waxing to the full were entrancing. There was a small piano on the barge, the notes of which had been brought by damp almost to the timbre of an exhausted spinet. It served however for Mrs. Grey to accompany Pauline while she played on a violin simple tunes. Guy used to lie back on deck and count the stars above Pauline's pavans and galliards: then from the silence that followed he would see her coming, shadowy, light as the dewfall, to sit close beside him, to sit, her hand in his, for an hour while the moon climbed the sky and the fern-owls croaked in their hunting. And as the romantic climax of the day, it was wonderful to fall asleep with the knowledge that Pauline slept nearer to him than she had ever slept before.
"Guy ought to go and see the Lamberts at the Manor," Mrs. Grey announced at the end of the second week. "I've written to Mrs. Lambert. It will be interesting for him."