"Do you like me as a bridesmaid?" she asked Guy.
And he with obviously eager welcome of the old Pauline could not find enough words to say how much he liked her.
"Richard of course is wearing a tail-coat," she murmured.
"I shan't," he whispered, "when we are married. I shall wear tweeds, and you shall wear your white frieze coat ... the one in which I first saw you. How little you've changed in these two years!"
"Have I? I think I've changed such a lot. Oh, Guy, such a tremendous lot."
He shook his head.
"My rose, if all roses could stay like you, what a world of roses it would be."
The wedding happened as perfectly as Pauline had imagined it would. Margaret looked most beautiful with her slim white satin gown and her weight of dusky hair, while Richard marched about stiff and awkward, yet so radiant that almost more than anyone it was he who inspired the ceremony with hymeneal triumph and carried it beyond the soilure of unmeaning tears, he and Pauline whose laughter was the expression of the joyous air, since Margaret was too deeply occupied with herself to cast a single questioning look.
In the evening when the diminished family sat in the drawing-room without going upstairs to music as a matter of course, Monica announced abruptly that at the end of the month she was going to be a novice in one of the large Anglican sisterhoods. It seemed as if she had most deliberately taken advantage of the general reaction in order that nobody might have the heart to combat her intention. Pauline and Mrs. Grey gasped, but they had no arguments to bring forward against the idea, and when Monica had outlined the plan in her most precise manner, they simply acquiesced in the decision as immutable.
That night, as Pauline lay awake with the excitement of the wedding still throbbing in her brain, the future from every side began to assail her fancy. It seemed to her since Margaret's marriage and Monica's decision to be a nun that she must be more than ever convinced of her absolute necessity to Guy's existence. Unless she were assured of this she had no right to leave her father and mother. No doubt at least a year would pass before she and Guy could be married, but nevertheless her decision must be made at once. He had not seemed to depend upon her so much when he was in London: his letters had no longer contained those intimate touches that formerly assured her of the intertwining of their lives. But it was not merely a question of letters, this attitude of his that latterly was continually being more sharply defined. Somewhere their love had diverged, and whereas formerly she had always been able to comfort herself with the certainty that between them love was exactly equal, now instead she could not help fancying that she loved him more than he loved her. It would of course be useless to ask him the question directly, for he would evade an answer by declaring it was prompted by unreasonable jealousy. Yet was her jealousy so very unreasonable, and if it were unreasonable was not that another reason against their marriage?