"Guy, how do I know? Come away into the air. We should never have come here. Oh, this room! I feel as if I should faint."
"I'll see who it was," said Guy, springing up.
"No, don't leave me. Wait for me. I'll come with you."
They hurried down the stairs, and when they reached the pallid lawn they saw Margaret and Monica in their white coats disappearing among the yew-trees by the entrance.
"There are your ghosts," said Guy, laughing.
Yet, though Guy scoffed at her fears, Pauline was not sure that she would not have preferred a ghost to that disquieting passage of her sisters without hail or comment. Yet perhaps, after all, they had not seen her and Guy in that sinister small parlor.
"Shall we catch them up?" he asked.
And Pauline, with a breath of dismay, was conscious of an inclination to pretend that they had not been here this afternoon. She discovered herself, as it were, proposing to Guy that they should not overtake Monica and Margaret. A secretiveness she had never known before had seized her soul, and she hoped that their presence in the Abbey was unknown. Guy divined at once that she did not want to overtake her sisters, and he kept her under the trees, where they watched each assault of the wind tearing at the little foliage that still remained. He guided her tenderly away from the sight of the house; and they walked along the broad path down through the shrubbery, meeting a rout of brown and red and yellow leaves that swept by them. She clung to Guy's arm as if this urgent and tumultuous wind had the power to sweep her, too, into the confusion; such an affraying journey was life beginning to seem. This ghastly elation of the October weather would not allow her breath to examine the perplexity in which she had involved herself. She felt that if the wind blew any louder she would have to scream out in defiance of its violence or else surrender miserably and be whirled into oblivion. A brown oak-leaf had escaped from the perishable host and was palpitating in a fold of her sleeve like a hunted creature; but when Pauline would have rescued it at the same moment a gust came roaring up the walk under the hissing trees, and the driven leaf was torn from its refuge and flung high into the air to join the myriads in their giddy riot of death.
"Come away from here," she cried to Guy. "Come away or I shall go mad in this wind."
He looked at her with a sort of judicial demeanor, as if he were in doubt whether he ought not to reprove such excitement.