On Midsummer Day about five o'clock Pauline and Guy set out on one of these expeditions that they had stolen from regularity, and found all their favorite fields occupied by haymakers whose labor they resented as an intrusion upon the country they had come to regard as their own.
"Oh, I wish I had money!" Guy exclaimed. "I'd like to buy all this land and keep it for you and me. Why must all these wretched people come and disturb the peace of it?"
"I used to love haymaking," said Pauline, feeling a little wistful for some of those simple joys that now seemed uncapturable again.
"Yes. I should like haymaking," Guy assented, "if we were married. It's the fact that haymakers are at this moment preventing us being alone which makes me cry out against them. How can I kiss you here?"
A wain loaded high with hay and laughing children was actually standing close against the ingress to their own peninsula. The mellow sun of afternoon was lending a richer quality of color to nut-brown cheeks and arms; was throwing long shadows across the shorn grass; was gilding the pitchforks and sparkling the gnats that danced above the patient horses. It was a scene that should have made Pauline dream with joy of her England; yet, with Guy's discontent brooding over it, she did not care for these jocund haymakers who were working through the lustered afternoon.
"Hopeless," Guy protested. "It's like Piccadilly Circus."
"Oh, Guy dear, you are absurd. It's not a bit like Piccadilly Circus."
"I don't see the use of living in the country if it's always going to be alive with people," Guy went on. "We may as well turn round. The afternoon is ruined."
When they reached the confines of Plashers Mead he exclaimed in deeper despair:
"Pauline! I must kiss you; and, look, actually the churchyard now is crammed with people, all hovering about over the graves like ghouls. Why does everybody want to come out this afternoon?"