"I do hope Guy really appreciates you," was what she said.
"See how the sparrows have pulled the crocuses into ribbons," Pauline exclaimed. And so that Monica could not talk to her any more, she hailed her father, who was wandering along towards the house on the other side of the lawn. When he sauntered across to them she pointed out the destructiveness of the sparrows.
"Ah, well, my dear," he chuckled, "most florists are worse."
"Perhaps I'm a florist," Monica whispered, "and Guy may be only a mischievous sparrow."
Pauline smiled at Monica and took her arm gratefully and affectionately.
"We shall have all the daffs gone before we know where we are," said the Rector. "Maximus is out under the oaks. And King Alfred is just going to turn down his buds."
"Dear King Alfred," said Pauline. "How glad I shall be to say good morning to him again!"
Yes, all the daffodils would soon be here and then gone; and beyond this austere afternoon already she could fancy a smell of March winds.
After Monica's question it was no longer possible for Pauline when she was alone to avoid facing the problem of Guy's attitude towards religion. The repression of her anxiety on this point had only increased the force of it when it was set free like this to compete with, and, in fact, overshadow all other cares. Looking back to her earliest thoughts of the world as it would one day affect herself, she remembered how, if she had ever imagined some one in love with her, she had always created a figure whose faith would be an eternal and joyful contemplation. She had never invented for herself a marriage with some one merely good-looking or rich or endowed with any of the romantic attributes that young girls were supposed to award their ideals, as her cousins would say, of men. When Guy entered her life, the only gift he brought her for which she was at all prepared was the conviction of his faith. This indeed was his spiritual and mental reality for her; the rest of him was a figment, a dream that might pass suddenly away. The visit of his father had given her a more clearly defined assurance of his existence on earth, but his faith had been the heart of the immortal substance of her love for Guy. The endlessness of their union was always present in her thoughts, the ultimate consolation of whatever delays they might be called upon to endure. Very often, even at the beginning of the engagement, Guy had frightened her sometimes by his indifference to immortality—sometimes by his harping upon the swift flight of youth, sometimes by his manifest indulgence of her creed. All these doubts, however, of his sympathy were allayed by his apparently deliberate pleasure in worship. She was angry with herself then for her mistrust of him, and her contentment had been perfect when in church he knelt beside her on that birthday of his, that day of their avowed betrothal, and on all those other occasions when he had given an outward proof of his faith. Now as she looked back on his absence from church lately, she could not but wonder whether all his attendance had not been a kind of fair-weather spoiling of her that could not withstand the least stress of worldly circumstance. She began to torment herself over every light remark that might have been a sneer and to look forward dreadfully to Guy's abrupt declaration of a profound disbelief in everything she held most sacred. His cleverness, as he hated her to call it, intervened and seemed to wrench them asunder; and the more she pondered his behavior, the more she became convinced that all the time Guy's religion had merely been Guy's kindness. This discovery was not to make her love him less; but it did throw upon her the responsibility of the knowledge that he had nothing within himself to fortify his soul, should mishap destroy his worldly confidence.
For a long time Pauline lay awake in the darkness, fretting herself on account of Guy's resourcelessness of spirit, and to her imagination concentrated on this regard of him every hour seemed to make his solitude more terrible. Of her own religion she did not think, and Monica's anxiety about their agreement after marriage was without the least hint of danger. The possibility of any one's, even Guy's, influencing her own faith was inconceivable; nor was she at all occupied with her own disappointment at not finding Guy constant to her belief in him. Pauline's one grief was for him, that now when things were going badly he should be without spiritual hope. Suddenly her warm bed seemed to her wrong and luxurious in comparison with the chill darkness she imagined about Guy's soul at this moment. Impulsively she threw back the sheets and knelt down beside the bed to pray for his peace. So vividly was she conscious of the need for prayer that she was carried to undreamed-of heights of supplication, to strange summits whereon it seemed that if she could not pray she would never know how to pray again. Ordinarily her devotions had been but a beautiful and simple end or beginning of the day; they were associated with the early warmth of the sunlight or with the gentle flutters of roosting birds; they were the comforting and tangible pledges of a childhood not yet utterly departed. Now the fires and ecstasies of a more searching faith had seized Pauline. No longer did there pass before her eyes a procession of gay-habited saints, glad celestial creatures that smiled down upon her from a paradise not much farther away than the Rectory garden; no longer did she find herself surrounded by the well-loved figures who when death took her to them would hold out their arms in actual welcome and whom she would recognize one by one. To-night these visions were uncapturable, and beyond the darkness they had forsaken stretched a terrifying void and beyond the void was nothing but light that seemed to have the power of thinking, "I am Truth!" A speck in that void she saw Guy spinning away from her, and it seemed that unless she prayed he would be spun irremediably out of her consciousness. It seemed that the fierceness of her prayer was like the fierceness of a flame that was granted the power to sustain him, for when sometimes the tongues of fire languished Guy would sink so far that only by summoning fresh force from the light beyond could she bring him back. Gradually, however, her power was waning, and with whatever desperate force she prayed he could never be brought back to the point from which he had last slipped. He was spinning away into a horror of blackness....