Pauline was very gentle when they met. She had no reproaches except for herself and the way she had frightened him.
"Oh, my Pauline, can't you forget it?" he begged. "Let me go away for a month or more. Let me go away till Margaret and Richard are going to be married."
She acquiesced half-listlessly, and then seeming to feel that she might have been cold in her manner, she wished him a happy holiday from her moods and jealousy and exacting love. He tried to pierce the true significance of her attitude, because it held in its heart a premonition for him that everything between them had been destroyed last night, and that henceforth whatever he or she did or said they would meet in the future only as ghosts may meet in shadowy converse and meaningless communion.
"You will be glad to see me when I come back?" he asked.
"Why, my dearest, of course I shall be glad."
He kissed her good-bye, but her kiss was neither the kiss of lover nor of sister, but such a kiss as ghosts may use, seeking to perpetuate the mere form and outward semblance of life lost irrevocably.
When Guy was driving with Godbold along the Shipcot road, he had not made up his mind where he would go, and it was on the spur of the moment, as he stood in the booking-office, that he decided to go and see his father, to whom latterly he had written scarcely at all and of whom he suddenly thought with affection.
"I've settled to give up Plashers Mead," Guy told him that night, when they were sitting in the library at Fox Hall.
"And try and get on the staff of a paper," he added to his father's faint bow. "Or possibly I may go to Persia as Sir George Gascony's secretary. My friend Comeragh got me the offer in March, but Sir George was ill and did not start."
"That sounds much more sensible than journalism," said Mr. Hazlewood.