How do their spirits pass, I wonder,
Nights and days in the narrow room?
Still, I suppose, they sit and ponder
What a gift life was, ages ago,
Six steps out of the chapel yonder.
On this Summer morning the words wrote themselves in fire across his brain.
"They light the way to dusty death," he muttered over and over again, when he had left Browning to Michael and flung himself face downward in the orchard grass.
In despair of what a havoc time was making of their youth and their love, that very afternoon he begged Pauline to meet him again now in these dark nights of early Summer, now when soon he would be going away from her.
"Going away?" she echoed in alarm. "I suppose that's the result of your friend's visit."
Guy, however, was not going to surrender again, and he insisted that when a month had passed he would indeed be gone from Plashers Mead. It was nothing to do with Michael Fane: it was solely his own determination to put an end to this unprofitable dalliance.
"But your poems? I thought that when your poems were published everything would be all right."
"Oh, my poems," he scoffed. "They're valueless!"
"Guy!"