"So do I," said the mother, breaking not a bar in her beat and gazing with soft eyes at that beloved player.
When the music stopped, Guy felt a little embarrassed by the remembrance of his unreserved avowal; yet evidently it had seemed natural to Mrs. Grey, for when he was saying good-bye in the hall, she whispered to Pauline that she could walk with Guy a short way along the drive. His heart leapt to the knowledge that here at last was the final sanction of his love for her. Pauline flung round her shoulders that white frieze coat in which he had first beheld her under the moon, misty, autumnal, a dream within a dream; and now they were actually walking together. He touched her arm half-timidly, as if even so light a gesture could destroy this moment.
"Pauline, Pauline!"
He saw her clear eyes in the February starshine and folding her close he kissed her mouth. When he woke, he was at home; and for hours he sat entranced, knowing that never again for as long as he lived would he feel upon his lips as now the freshness of Pauline's first kiss.
The rest of that February went by with lengthening eves that died on the dusky riot of blackbirds in the rhododendrons. Here and there in mossy corners primroses were come too soon, seeming all aghast and wan to behold themselves out of the cloistral earth, while the buds of the daffodils were still upright and would not hang their heads till driven by the wooing of the windy March sun.
The grey-eyed virginal month, that is of no season and must as often bear the malice of Winter's retreat as the ruffianly onset of Spring, had now that very seriousness which suited Guy's troth.
Rules had been made with which neither he nor Pauline were discontented, and so through all that February Guy went twice a week to the Rectory and counted himself rich in Mrs. Grey's promise that he and Pauline should sometimes be allowed, when the season was full-fledged, to go for walks together. At present, however, the Rectory garden must be a territory large enough for their love.
These first encounters were endowed with perhaps not much more than the excitement of what were in a way superficial observations, since neither of them was yet attempting to sound any deeps in the other's character. Guy was engaged with driving a wedge into that past of the Rectory whose least events he now envied, and he was never tired of the talks about Pauline's childhood, so much of a fairy-tale she still seemed and fit for endless repetition. And if Guy was never tired of being told, her family was never tired of telling. Never, he thought, was lover so fortunate in an audience as he in the willingness with which he was accorded a confirmation of all his praises. Sometimes, indeed, he had to look reproachfully at Monica or Margaret when Pauline seemed hurt at being checked for some piece of demonstrativeness. If he did so, the sisters would always take an opportunity to draw him aside and explain that it was only Pauline's perfection which made them so anxious for its security. Indeed they guarded her perpetually and with such a high sense of the privilege of wardship that Guy always had to forgive them at once. Moreover, he was so conscious of their magnanimity in considering him as a lover that he was almost afraid to claim his right.
"Margaret," he said one day. "I don't know how you can bear to contemplate Pauline married. Why, when I think of myself, I'm simply dumb before the—what word is there—audacity is much too pale and, oh, what word is there?"
"I don't think I could contemplate her married to anybody but you," said Margaret.