So the business went on, with Guy on tenterhooks all the while for his own summing-up by the Rector. He thought the moment was arrived when Birdwood was sent off on an errand and when the Rector, getting up from his kneeler, began to shake the trowel at him impressively. But all he said was:
"Tingitana's plumping up magnificently. And we'll have some flowers in three weeks—the first I shall have had since the Diamond Jubilee. Sun! Sun!"
Guy jumped at the apostrophe, so nearly did it approximate to "son-in-law." But of this relation nothing was said, and now Pauline was calling out that tea was ready.
"Go in, my dear fellow," said the Rector. "I've still a few things to do in the garden. By the way, was your father at Trinity, Oxford?"
"No, he was at Exeter."
"Ah, then I didn't know him. I knew a Hazlewood at Trinity."
The Rector turned away to business elsewhere, and Guy was left to puzzle over his casual allusion. Perhaps he ought to have raised the subject of being in love with Pauline, for which purpose the Rector may have given him an opening. Or did this inquiry about his father portend a letter to him from the Rector about his son's prospects? He certainly ought to have said something to make the Rector realize how much tact would be necessary in approaching his father. Pauline called again from the nursery window, and Guy hurried off to join the rest of the family at tea.
In the drawing-room Mrs. Grey, Monica, and Margaret all seemed anxious to show their pleasure in Pauline's happiness; and Guy in the assurance this old house gave him of a smooth course for his love ceased to worry any longer about parental problems and was content to live in the merry and intimate present. He realized how far he was advanced in his relation to the family when Brydone, the doctor's son, came in to call. Guy took a malicious delight in his stilted talk, as for half an hour he tried to explain to Monica, a grave and abstracted listener, how the pike would in March go up the ditches and the shallow backwaters, and what great sport it was to snare them with a copper noose suspended from a long pole. There was, too, that triumphant moment he had long desired, when Brydone, rising to take his leave, asked if Guy were coming and when he was able to reply casually that he was not coming just yet.
After tea Guy and Pauline, as if by an impulse that occurred to both of them simultaneously, begged Margaret to come and talk in the nursery. She seemed pleased that they wanted her; and the three of them spent the time till dinner in looking at the old familiar things of childhood—at photographs of Monica and Margaret and Pauline in short frocks; at tattered volumes scrawled in by the fingers of little girls.
"I wish I'd known you when you were small," sighed Guy. "How wasted all these years seem."