Yet, though Guy scoffed at her fears, Pauline was not sure that she would not have preferred a ghost to that disquieting passage of her sisters without hail or comment. Yet perhaps after all they had not seen her and Guy in that sinister small parlour.
"Shall we catch them up?" he asked.
And Pauline with a breath of dismay was conscious of an inclination to pretend that they had not been here this afternoon. She discovered herself, as it were, proposing to Guy that they should not overtake Monica and Margaret. A secretiveness she had never known before had seized her soul, and she hoped that their presence in the Abbey was unknown. Guy divined at once that she did not want to overtake her sisters, and he kept her under the trees, where they watched each assault of the wind tearing at the little foliage that still remained. He guided her tenderly away from the sight of the house; and they walked along the broad path down through the shrubbery, meeting a rout of brown and red and yellow leaves that swept by them. She clung to Guy's arm as if this urgent and tumultuous wind had the power to sweep her too into the confusion: such an affraying journey was life beginning to seem. This ghastly elation of the October weather would not allow her breath to examine the perplexity in which she had involved herself. She felt that if the wind blew any louder, she would have to scream out in defiance of its violence or else surrender miserably and be whirled into oblivion. A brown oakleaf had escaped from the perishable host and was palpitating in a fold of her sleeve like a hunted creature; but when Pauline would have rescued it at the same moment a gust came roaring up the walk under the hissing trees, and the driven leaf was torn from its refuge and flung high into the air to join the myriads in their giddy riot of death.
"Come away from here," she cried to Guy. "Come away or I shall go mad in this wind."
He looked at her with a sort of judicial demeanour, as if he were in doubt whether he ought not to reprove such excitement.
"It was really beginning to blow quite fiercely," he said when they had reached the comparative stillness of Abbey Lane.
Behind them Pauline still heard with terror and hatred the moaning of the trees, and she hurried away from the sound.
"Never, never will I go there again. Why did you ask me to go there? I would sooner have met a thousand Brydones than have been in that house."
"Pauline," he protested. "You really do sometimes encourage yourself to be overwrought."
"Guy, don't lecture me," she said, turning upon him fiercely.