The days with Michael at St. Giles went by slowly enough, and their fairness was a wasted boon. Guy wrote many long letters to Pauline and received from her another letter in which she began with "My dearest," as he had begged her. Yet when he read the herald vocative, he wished he had not tried to alter that old abrupt opening, for never again would she write in the faint ink of shyness such a sentence as had tumbled down the back of her first letter.
Michael seemed to divine that he was in love, and Guy wondered why he could not tell him about it. Once or twice he nearly brought himself to the point, but the thought of describing Pauline kept him mute; Michael must see her first. The canoe would be ready at the end of the week, and Guy announced he should paddle it up to Wychford, traveling from the Isis to the upper Thames, and from the upper Thames turning aside at Oldbridge to follow the romantic course of the Greenrush even to his own windows.
"Rather fun," said Michael, "if the weather stays all right."
"By Jove!" Guy exclaimed, "I believe it was at Oldbridge Inn that I first met you."
"On May Day three years ago," Michael agreed.
And, thought Guy, with a compassionate feeling for mere friendship, what a much more wonderful May Day should be this when Pauline was twenty. There was now her birthday present to buy, and Guy set out on the quest of it with as much exaltation as Percival may have sought the Holy Grail. He wished it were a ring he could buy for her; and indeed ultimately he could not resist a crystal set on a thin gold circlet that she, his rose of girls, would wear like a dewdrop. This ring, however, could not be his formal gift, but it would have to be offered when they were alone, and it must be worn nowhere but in the secret country they haunted with their love. The ring, uncostly as it was, took nearly all Guy's spare money, and he decided to buy a book for her, because in Oxford bookshops he still had accounts running. The April afternoon wore away while in his own particular bookshop kept by Mr. Brough, an ancient man with a white beard, he took down from the shelves volume after volume. At last he found a small copy of Blake's Lyrics bound in faded apple-green calf and tooled in a golden design of birds, berries, and daisies. This must be for Pauline, he decided, since some one must have known the pattern of that nursery wall-paper and, loving it, have wished it to be recorded more endurably. What more exquisite coincidence could assure him that this book was meant for Pauline? Yet he was half jealous of the unknown designer who had thought of something of which himself might have thought. Oh yes, this must be for Pauline; and as Guy rescued it from the dust and darkness of the old shop he ascribed to the green volume an emotion of relief, and was half aware of promising to it a new and dearer owner who with cherishing would atone for whatever misfortune had brought it to these gloomy shelves.
Next morning, when Guy was ready to start, Michael presented him with a glazier's diamond pencil.
"When you fall in love, Guy, this will serve to scribble sonnets to your lady on the lattices of Plashers Mead. I shall probably come there myself when term's over."
"I wish you'd come and live there with me," said Guy in a last effort to persuade Michael. "You see, if you shared the house it wouldn't cost so much."
"Perhaps I will," said Michael. "Who knows? I wonder what your Rectory people would think of me?"