He mentioned names one after another, but to Pauline they were the names of stone idols that stared unresponsively at her lover's poems.
"If we had only done what Mother wanted and not seen so much of each other," she lamented.
Guy's disposal of her vain fears was without effect, for his eloquence could not contend with these deepening regrets; and as fast as he threw down the material obstacles to their happiness Pauline saw them maddeningly rise again in the path before them, visible shapes of ill omen, grotesquely irrepressible. Guy used to asseverate that when Spring was really come she would lose all these morbid fancies, and with his perpetual ascription to wintry gloom of all the presentiments of woe that flocked round their intercourse, Pauline did begin to fancy that, when the trees were green, he and she would rejoice as of old in their love. The knowledge that Spring could not linger always was the only consoling certainty she now possessed, and from the window-seat she greeted with a passionate welcome each dusky azure minute that on these lengthening eves was robbed from night. The blackbirds sang to her now more personally, these sombre-suited heralds who had never before seemed to proclaim so audaciously masterful Spring; and when the young moon cowered among the ragged clouds of a rainy golden sky and the last bird slipped like a shadow into the rhododendrons, such airs and whispers of April would steal through the open window. Every day too there were flowery tokens of hope and in sheltered corners of the garden the primroses came out one by one, an imperceptible assemblage like the birth of stars in the luminous green West. This grey-eyed virginal month had now such memories of the last progress it made through her life that Pauline could not help imputing to the season a sentimental participation in her life: there was a poignancy in the reopening of those blue Greek anemones which Guy, a year ago, had likened to her eyes, a poignancy that might have been present if the flowers had been consciously reminding her of vanished delights. Yet it was unreasonable to encourage such an emotion, or did she indeed, as sometimes was half whispered to her inmost soul, regret the slightest bit everything since that day of the anemones?
It was one evening toward the end of the month that Monica joined her and walked up and down the edge of the lawn where in the grass a drift of purple crocuses had lately been flaming for her solitary adoration.
"In a way," said Pauline, "they are my favourite flowers of all. I don't think there is any thrill quite like the first crocus bud. It seems to me that as far as I can look back, oh, Monica, ever so far, that always the moment I've seen my crocuses budding winter seems to fly away."
"I remember your looking for them when you were tiny," Monica agreed. "I can see you now kneeling down, and the mud on your knees, and your eyes screwed up when you told me about your discovery."
They talked for a while of childish days, each capping the other's evocation of those hours that now in retrospect appeared like the gay pictures of an old book long ago lost, and found again on an idle afternoon. They talked too of Margaret and whether she would marry Richard; and presently, without the obvious transition that would have made her silent, Pauline found that they were discussing Guy and herself.
"I notice he doesn't come to church now so much as he did," said Monica.
Pauline was startled by an abrupt statement of something which among all the other worries she had never defined to herself, but which now that Monica revealed its shape she knew had occupied a dark corner at the back of her mind more threatening than any of the rest. Of course she began at once to make excuses for Guy, but her sister, who brought to religion the same scrupulous temperament she gave to her music, would not admit their validity.
"Don't you ever ask him why he hasn't been?" she persisted.