Guy was taken aback, and when he asked himself why he had done this, he could not find a reason. Now that Margaret had spoken of it, the consciousness of the exchange flooded him with shame as for an unforgivable piece of vandalism. Why indeed had he bought that silver frame and put the old wooden frame away, and where was the old wooden frame? In one of the drawers in his desk, he thought; resolving this very night to restore it to the photograph and fling the usurper into the river. "I can't think why I did," he stammered to Margaret. "You've no idea how much this has worried me," she said. "I never had any doubts about your appreciation of Pauline." "And now you have," said Guy, biting his lip with mortification. The landscape fading from the stern of the barge oppressed him with the sadness of irreparable acts that are committed heedlessly, but after which nothing is ever quite the same. He wished he could tear to pieces that silver frame. "No, I won't have any doubts," said Margaret, offering him her hand again and smiling. "You've taken my criticism so sweetly that the change can't symbolize so much as I feared." It was very well to be forgiven like this, Guy thought, but the memory of his blunder was still hot upon his cheek and he felt a deep humiliation at the treachery of his taste. He had meant, when he came here to talk to Margaret, to ask her about herself and Richard, to display a captivating sympathy and restore to their pristine affection her relations with him, which latterly had seemed to diverge somewhat from one another. Now haunted by that silver frame, which with every moment of thought appeared more and more insistently the vile stationer's gewgaw that it was, Guy did not dare to approach Margaret in the security of an old intimacy. It was she, however, with her grace who healed the wound. "You're not hurt with me for speaking about that little thing?" she asked. "You see, you are in a way my brother." "Margaret, you are a dear!" And then recurred to him as if from Ladingford Manor the lines of Christina Rossetti, which he half whispered to her: _For there is no friend like a sister_ _In calm or stormy weather;_ _To cheer one if one goes astray,_ _To lift one if one totters down,_ _To strengthen whilst one stands._ They had the sharper emotion for Guy because he had neither brothers nor sisters of his own; and that this lovely girl beside him on this dreaming barge should be his sister gave to the landscape one more incommunicable beauty. And so all day they glided down the young Thames; and when Guy had sat long enough with Margaret in the stern, he sat with Pauline at the prow; and about twilight they reached Oxford, whence they came to Shipcot by train and drove through five miles of moonlight back to Wychford. _August_