Wednesday.
I am writing to you at my desk. I began this morning but it was time to go out when I began. Now it's after tea. Margaret came in just now and said I looked all crinkled up like a shell: it's because I simply don't know how to write to you. I have read your letter over and over and over again. I never thought there could be such a wonderful letter in the world. But I feel very sorry for poor Richard who can't write letters as exquisite as yours. I really feel miserable about him. And this letter to you makes me feel miserable because I can't write letters even as well as Richard. Mother was glad you thought of going to Oxford because she says we are a great responsibility to her. Isn't she sweet? She really is you know. So I talked to Father myself very seriously. I explained to him that I was quite old enough to know my own mind, and he listened to all the things I told him about you. He said he supposed it was innevvitable, which looks very funny somehow. Are you laughing at my spelling? And then he said it was nothing to do with him. So of course I rushed off to Mother and told her and when you come back we are to be allowed to go out twice a week and in three more months we can be engaged properly. Are you happy? Only, dear Guy, Mother doesn't want you to come back till my birthday. She thinks the idea of you and me will be better when Father has got an Iris Lorti or some name like that. He has never had a flower of it before and he's so excited about it's coming out just when my birthday is. Every day he goes down and pinches the stalk of it. He says it's the loveliest flower in the world and grows on Mount Lebanon. So if it comes out on my birthday, you and I can certainly be engaged in August. Guy, I do hate my handwriting.
Your loving Pauline.
It was a letter of gloriously good news, thought Guy, though he was a little disappointed not to have had the thrill of Pauline's endearment. Then, on the blank outside page, he saw scrawled in writing that went tumbling head over heels down the paper: My darling Guy, I love you and underneath I have kissed the letter for you.
The sentence died out in faint ink that seemed to show forth the whisper in which it had been written. For Guy the tumbledown letters were written in fire; and with the treasure in his heart of that small sentence, read a hundred times, he did not know how he should endure ten long days without Pauline, and in this old college garden, on this sedate and academic lawn, he cried out that he adored her as if indeed she were beside him in this laylocked air. At the sound of his voice the birds close at hand were all silent: they might have stopped to listen. Then a green-finch called 'sweet! sweet!', whose gentle and persistent proclamation was presently echoed by all the other birds twittering together again in the confused raptures of their Spring.
The days with Michael at St. Giles went by slowly enough, and their fairness was a wasted boon. Guy wrote many long letters to Pauline and received from her another letter in which she began with 'My dearest' as he had begged her. Yet when he read the herald vocative, he wished he had not tried to alter that old abrupt opening, for never again would she write in the faint ink of shyness such a sentence as had tumbled down the back of her first letter.
Michael seemed to divine that he was in love, and Guy wondered why he could not tell him about it. Once or twice he nearly brought himself to the point, but the thought of describing Pauline kept him mute: Michael must see her first. The canoe would be ready at the end of the week, and Guy announced he should paddle it up to Wychford, travelling from the Isis to the upper Thames and from the upper Thames turning aside at Oldbridge to follow the romantic course of the Greenrush even to his own windows.
"Rather fun," said Michael. "If the weather stays all right."
"By Jove," Guy exclaimed, "I believe it was at Oldbridge Inn that I first met you."
"On May Day three years ago," Michael agreed.