"What attitude? What do you mean, Guy?"
He shook his head.
"My dear, if you aren't conscious of it, I'm certainly not going to attempt to put it into words and involve myself in such a net."
"How tantalizing you are!"
"No, I'm not. If you have the least inclination to think I may be right, then you know what I mean and you can do what I ask. If you haven't the least notion of what I mean, then it was all my fancy and I'm certainly not going to give my baseless fancies away."
"This is all too cryptic," she murmured.
"Then let it remain undeciphered," he said smiling; and he led the conversation more directly toward their marriage and the strangeness of the Rectory without Margaret.
Richard spent the night at Plashers Mead, and Guy heard the halting account of two years' uncertainty, of the bungalow that had been taken and embowered against Margaret's coming, and of the way in which his bridge had spanned not merely the river, but the very ocean, and even time itself.
Pauline's birthday morning was cloudless, and Guy, though to himself he was inclined to blame the action as weak, went to church and knelt beside her. Then afterward there was the scene of breakfast on the lawn that already with only this first repetition wore for him an immemorial air, so that he could no longer imagine a May Day that was not thus inaugurated. The presentation of his poems in proof had not a bit less wonderful an effect than he had hoped, for Pauline could never finish turning over the pages and loving the ludicrously tumbledown binding.
"Oh, it's so touching! I wish they could all be bound like this. And how I adore Richard's paper-knife."