How could Margaret sit there talking so unconcernedly, when Richard might be dying of sunstroke at this very moment? Margaret was heartless, and this stranger with his drawl and his undergraduate affectation would encourage her to sneer at everything.

"What's the matter, Pauline dearest?" her mother turned round to ask.

"Nothing," answered Pauline, biting her lips to keep back surely the most unreasonable tears she had ever felt were springing.

"You're not cross with me for calling you a landslide?" persisted Mrs. Grey, smiling at her from the midst of a glory momentarily shed by a stormy ray of sunshine.

"Oh, mother," said Pauline, now fairly in the midway between laughter and tears. "It was an avalanche you called me."

"Why do you always sit near a window?" asked Monica.

"She always rushes into a corner," said Margaret.

Pauline jumped up from her chair and would have run out of the room forthwith; but in passing the first table she knocked from it a silver bowl of pot-pourri and scattered the contents over the carpet. Down she knelt to hide her confusion and repair the damage, and at the same moment Guy plunged down beside her to help. She caught his eyes so tenderly humorous that she too laughed.

"I think it must be my fault," he said. "Don't you remember how, last time we met, your sister upset the mushrooms?"

Pauline knew she was blushing, and when the rose-leaves were all gathered up, tea came in. Her attention was now entirely occupied by preventing her mother from doing the most ridiculous things with cakes and sugar and milk, and when tea was over, Guy got up to go.

There was a brief discussion after his departure, in which Margaret was so critical of his dress and of his absurdities that Pauline was reassured, and presently indeed found herself taking their visitor's part against her sisters.

"Quite right, quite right, Pauline," said Mrs. Grey. "He's charming ... charming ... charming! Margaret and Monica so critical. Always so critical."

Presently the family hurried out into the drive to protest against the Rector's planting any more bulbs, to tell him how unkind he had been not to come in to tea, and to warn him that the bell would sound for Evensong in two minutes. He was dragged out of the shrubbery where he had been superintending a clearance of aucubas, preparatory to planting a drift of new and very deep yellow primroses.

"Really, my dears, I have never seen Primula Vulgaris so fine in texture or colour. My friend Gilmour has spent ten years working up the stock. As large as florins."

So he boasted of new wonders next Spring in the Rectory garden, while his wife and daughters brushed him and dusted him and helped to button up his cassock.

"Doesn't Father look a darling?" demanded Pauline, as they watched the tall handsome dreamer striding along the drive towards the sound of the bell, that was clanging loud and soft in its battle with the wind.

"Oh, Pauline, run after him," said Mrs. Grey, "and remind him it's the Eighteenth Sunday after Trinity. He started wrong last Sunday, and to-day's Wednesday, and it so offends some of the congregation."

Pauline overtook her father in the church-porch, and he promised he would be careful to read the right collect. She had not stayed to get a hat and therefore must wait for him outside.

"Very well, my dear child, I shan't be long. Do go and see if those Sternbergias I planted against the south porch are in flower. Dear me, they should be, you know, after this not altogether intolerably overcast summer. Sun, though, sun! they want sun, poor dears!"

"But, Father, I can't remember what Sternbergias look like."

"Oh, yes, you can," said the Rector. "Sternbergia Lutea. Amaryllidaceae. A perfectly ordinary creature." And he vanished in the gloom of the priest's door.

As Pauline came round the corner the wind was full in her face, and under the rose-edged wrack of driving clouds the churchyard looked desolate and savage. There were no flowers to be seen but beaten down Michaelmas daisies and bedabbled phlox. The bell had stopped immediately when the Rector arrived; and the wind seemed now much louder as it went howling round the great church or rasping through the yews and junipers. The churchyard was bounded on the northerly side by the mill-stream, along which ran a wide path between a double row of willows now hissing and whistling as they were whipped by the blasts. Pauline walked slowly down this unquiet ambulatory, gazing curiously over to the other bank of the stream where the orchard of Plashers Mead was strewn with red apples. There in the corner by the house that was just visible stood the owner playing with a dog, a bobtail too, which was the kind Pauline liked best. She wanted very much to wave, but of course it was impossible for the Rector's daughter to do anything like that in the churchyard. Yet if he did chance to walk in her direction, she would, whatever happened, shout to him across the stream to bring the dog next time he came to the Rectory. Pauline walked four times up and down the path, but first the dog disappeared and then the owner followed him, and presently Pauline discovered that the path beside the abandoned stream was very dreary. The crooked tombstones stood up starkly: the wind sighed across the green graves of the unknown: the fiery roses were fallen from the clouds. Pauline turned away from the path and went to take shelter behind the East end of the church. From here, as she fronted the invading night, she could see the grey wall of the Rectory garden and the paddock sloping down to the river. How sad it was to think of the months that must pass before that small meadow would be speckled with fritillaries or with irises blow white and purple. The wind shrieked with a sudden gust that seemed more violent, because where she was standing not a blade of grass twitched. Pauline looked up to reassure herself that the steeple was not toppling from the tower; as she did so, a gargoyle grinned down at her. The grotesque was frightening in the dusk, and she hurried round to the priest's door. The Rector came out as she reached it, and accepted vaguely the information that there were no flowers to be seen but Michaelmas daisies and phlox.

"Ah, I told Birdwood to confiscate those abominable dahlias which wretched Mrs. Godbold will plant every year. I gave her some of that new saxifrage I raised. What more does the woman want?"

Pauline hung upon his arm, while they walked back to the Rectory through the darkling plantation.

"Isn't it a perfect place?" she murmured, hugging his arm closer when they came to the end of the mossy path and saw the twinkling of the drawing-room's oriel on the narrow south side, and the eleven steep gables that cleft the now scarcely luminous sky, one after another all the length of the house.

"I doubt if anything but this confounded cotoneaster would do well against this wall," replied the Rector.

He never failed to make this observation when he reached his front-door; and his family knew that one day the cotoneaster would be torn down for a succession of camellias to struggle with the east winds of unkind Oxfordshire. In the hall Mrs. Grey and Margaret were bending over a table.

"Guy has left his card," said Margaret.

"Is that the man who came to see me about the rats?" asked the Rector.

"No, no, Francis," said Mrs. Grey. "Guy is the young man at Plashers Mead."

"Isn't Francis sweet?" cried Pauline, reaching up to kiss him.

"Hush, Pauline. Pauline, you must not call your father Francis in the hall," said Mrs. Grey.

"How touching of Guy to leave a card," Pauline murmured, looking at the oblong of pasteboard shimmering in the gloom.

"Now we've just time to practise the Mendelssohn trio before dinner," declared Mrs. Grey. "And that will make you warm."

The Rector wandered off to his library. Margaret and Pauline went with their mother