Ah, there were pages crammed full and full of words that she must read alone. She could not read them here with her mother and sisters looking at her over the table. She must read them high in her white fastness at the top of the house. There all the morning she sat, and when she had read of his love once, she read of it again and then again, and once again. How foolish her answering letter would be: how disappointed Guy would be; but since she had promised, she must write to him: and, sitting at her desk that was full of childish things, she curled herself over the note paper.

May

A PLEASANT company of thoughts travelled with Guy and his bicycle on the road to Oxford. In this easy progress the material hindrances to marriage were not seeming very important, and as he thought of his love for Pauline it spread before him, untroublous like the road down which he was spinning before a light breeze. With so much to compensate for their brief parting it was impossible to feel depressed; and as Guy drew near the city he felt he was an undergraduate again; and when he greeted Michael Fane in St. Giles he could positively hear his own Oxford drawl again. It was really delightful to be sitting here in view of his old college; and when after lunch he and Michael started for Wytham woods, more and more Guy was in an Oxford dream and carrying off the fantastic notion of the Parnassian academy with all the debonair confidence of his second year. Yet Guy knew that the scheme was absurd and when Michael argued against it in his solemn way he found himself taking the other side from a mere undergraduate pleasure in argument. Indeed, Michael declared he had become a freshman since he went down, which made Guy stop dead, ankle-deep in kingcups, and laugh aloud for his youth, with hidden thoughts of Pauline to make him rejoice that he was young. He laughed again at Michael's seriousness and flung his scheme to the broad clouds, for on this generous day he and Pauline were enough, and neither anybody else's opinion nor anybody else's help was worth a second thought. The heartening warmth, however, did not last; and when toward evening the sun faded in a blanche of watery clouds with a cold wind for aftermath, Guy felt Michael might have been more sympathetic. Rather silently they walked back from Godstow, with Pauline between them; so that after all, Guy thought, Michael was still an undergraduate, whereas he had embarked upon life.

That night, however, when the curtains were drawn across Michael's bay-window that overhung the whispering and ancient thoroughfare; when the fire burned high and the tobacco-smoke clouded the glimmer of the books on the walls; when his chair creaked with that old Oxford creaking, Guy forgave Michael for any lack in his reception of the great plan. After all, he was writing to Pauline, while his host was reading the Constitutional History of England at a table littered with heavy volumes, on which he brooded like a melancholy spectator of ruins. He must not be hard on Michael, who had not yet touched life, when for himself the vision of Pauline was wreathing this old room with starry blooms of wild rose. The letter was finished, and Guy went out to drop it in the pillar-box. His old college brooded at him across the road; to-morrow he must go and look up some of the dons; to-morrow Pauline would get his letter; to-night there would be rain; to-morrow Pauline would get his letter! The envelope, as it shuffled down into the letter-box, seemed to say 'yes'.

When Guy was back in the fumy St. Giles room, he decided there was something rather finely ascetic about Michael seated there and reading imperturbably in the lamp-light. His courteously fatigued manner was merely that of the idealist who had overreached himself; there was nothing bilious about him, not even so much cynicism as had slightly chilled Guy's own career at Oxford; rather did there emanate from Michael a kind of mediaeval steadfastness comparable only to those stone faces that look calmly down upon the transitory congregations of their church. Michael had this solemn presence that demanded an upward look, and once again an upward look, until without conversation the solemnity became a little disquieting. Guy felt bound to interrupt with light-hearted talk of his own that slow still gaze across the lampshine.

"Dash it, Michael, don't brood there like a Memento Mori. Put away Magna Charta and talk to me. You used to talk."

"You talk, Guy. You've been living alone all this time. You must have a great deal to say."

So Guy flung theories of rhyme and metre to overwhelm Magna Charta; and, next day, he and Michael walked all over Oxford in the rain, he himself still talking. The day after, there came with the sun a letter from Pauline which he took away with him to read in the garden of St. John's, leaving Michael to Magna Charta.

There was nobody on the lawn, and Guy sat down on a wooden seat in air that was faintly perfumed by the precocious blooms of a lilac breaking to this unusual warmth of April. Unopened the letter rested in his hand: for his name written in this girlish charactery took on the romantic look of a name in an old tale. A breathlessness was in the air, such as had brooded upon Pauline's first kiss; and Guy sat marmoreal and rapt in an ecstasy of anticipation that he would never have from any other letter; so still he was, that an alighting blackbird slipt over the grass almost to his feet before it realized the mistake and shrilled away on startled wings into the bushes behind. The trance of expectation was spoilt, and Guy with a sigh broke the envelope.

WYCHFORD RECTORY OXON.