I love you. I love you.
Gently the daffodils swayed in this light breeze of dying March, and the grass was already tall enough to sigh forth its transitory summer tune. Guy in a flood of penitence hastened at once to the Rectory to accuse himself to Pauline, and when he saw her watching for him at the nursery window he had no regrets that could stab to wound him as deeply as he deserved to be wounded. She was very tender and still that afternoon, and as he held her in his arms there seemed to him nothing more worth while in life than her cherishing. For them sitting in that nursery the hours swung lazily to and fro in felicity, and all the time there was nobody to disturb the reconciliation. They talked only of the future and allowed recent despairs and foreboding agitations to slink away disgraced. Janet, coming to take away the tea-things, beamed at their happiness and through a filigree of bare jasmine twigs the slanting sun touched with new life the faded wall-paper, opening wider, it seemed, the daisies' eyes, mellowing the berries and tinting the birds with brighter plumes for their immutable and immemorial courtship.
Plunged deep in such a peace Guy prompted by damnable discord asked idly what had been that dream of which Pauline had spoken in her letter. She was unwilling for a long while to tell him, but he spurred on by mischief itself persuaded her in the end and she recounted that experience of waking to find herself prone upon the floor of her room.
"No wonder you're looking pale," he exclaimed. "Now you see the result of exciting yourself unnecessarily."
"But it was so vivid," she protested, "and really the light was blinding and it thought so terribly all the time."
"I shall think very terribly that you've been reading some spiritualistic rot in a novel," said Guy, "if you talk like that. Your religion may be true, but I'm quite sure these conjuring tricks of your fancy are a sign of hysteria. And this poor speck that was me? How did you know it was me if it was a speck? Did that think too? My foolish Pauline, you encouraged your morbid ideas when you were awake and when you were asleep you paid the penalty."
She had gone away from him and was standing by the window.
"Guy, if you talk like that, it means you don't really love me. It means you have no sympathy, that you're cold and cruel and cynical."
He sighed with elaborate compassion for her state of mind.
"And what else? I wonder how you ever managed to fall in love with me."