A wain loaded high with hay and laughing children was actually standing close against the ingress to their own peninsula. The mellow sun of afternoon was lending a richer quality of colour to nutbrown cheeks and arms; was throwing long shadows across the shorn grass; was gilding the pitchforks and sparkling the gnats that danced above the patient horses. It was a scene that should have made Pauline dream with joy of her England: yet, with Guy's discontent brooding over it, she did not care for these jocund haymakers who were working through the lustred afternoon. "Hopeless," Guy protested. "It's like Piccadilly Circus." "Oh, Guy dear, you are absurd. It's not a bit like Piccadilly Circus." "I don't see the use of living in the country if it's always going to be alive with people," Guy went on. "We may as well turn round. The afternoon is ruined." When they reached the confines of Plashers Mead, he exclaimed in deeper despair: "Pauline! I must kiss you; and, look, actually the churchyard now is crammed with people, all hovering about over the graves like ghouls. Why does everybody want to come out this afternoon?" They landed in the orchard behind the house, and Pauline was getting ready to help Guy push the canoe across to the mill-stream, when he vowed she must come and kiss him good-night indoors. "Of course I will; though I mustn't stay more than a minute, because I promised Mother to be back by seven." "I don't deserve you," said Guy, standing still and looking down at her. "I've done nothing but grumble all the afternoon, and you've been an angel. Ah, but it's only because I long to kiss you." "I long to kiss you," she murmured. "Do you? Do you?" he whispered. "Oh, with those ghouls in the churchyard I can't even take your hand." They crossed the bridge from the orchard and came round to the front of the house into full sunlight, and thence out of the dazzle into Guy's hall that was filled with watery melodies and the green light of their own pastoral world. Close they kissed, close and closer in the coolness and stillness. "Pauline! I shall go mad for love of you." "I love you. I love you," she sighed, nestling to his arms' enclosure. "Pauline!" "Guy!" Each called to the other as if over an abyss of years and time. Then Pauline said she must go back, but Guy reminded her of a book she had promised to read, and begged her just to come with him to the library. "I do want to talk to you once alone in my own room," he said. "The evenings won't seem so empty when I can think of you there." She could not disappoint him, and they went upstairs and into his green room that smelt of tobacco-smoke and meadowsweet. They stood by the window looking out over their territory, and Guy told for the hundredth time how, as it were, straight from this window he had plunged to meet her that September night.