Pauline had heard the jingle often enough, but spoken solemnly like this by Guy on Wychford down, it flooded her cheeks with blushes, and in a sort of dear alarm the truth of it declared itself. She was startlingly aware of a new life, as it were demanding all sorts of questions of her. She felt a shyness that nearly drove her to run away from her companion, and yet at the same moment brought a complete incapacity for movement of any kind, an incapacity too that was full of rapture. She longed for him to say something of such convincing ordinariness as would break the spell and prove to her that she was still Pauline Grey; while with all her desire for the spell to be broken, she was wondering if every moment she were not deliberately offering herself to enchantment.
"Have you ever felt," Guy was asking, "a long time after you've met somebody, as if you had suddenly met that person again for the first time?"
Pauline shook her head vaguely. Then with an effort she recaptured her old self and said, laughing:
"But then, you see, I never think about anything."
"Sleeping beauty, sleeping beauty," said Guy.
And with an abrupt change of manner he began to throw sticks for Bob, so that the lucid air was soon loud with continuous barking.
"I wonder if we shall ever meet again on Wychford down?" said Guy, as together they swung along the rolling highroad towards the village.
A horse and trap caught them up before Pauline could answer the speculation, and Mr. Godbold, as he passed, wished them both a very good morning.
"Godbold seems extraordinarily interested in us," Guy remarked, when for the third time before he turned the corner Mr. Godbold looked back at them.
"Oh, I wonder...." Pauline began, expressing with her lips sudden apprehension.