"I feel everybody will be pitying you for becoming engaged to a penniless pretender like me," he sighed. "Don't be so stupid, Guy. If they pity anybody, they'll pity you for having a wife so utterly vague about practical things as I am. But I won't be, Guy, when we're married." "Oh, my own, I wish we were married now. God! I wish, I wish we were!" He had clasped her to him, and she drew away. Guy begged her pardon for swearing: but really she had drawn away because his eyes were so bright and wild that she was momentarily afraid of him. August kept wet and stormy; but on the nineteenth, the day before Guy's birthday and the vigil of their betrothal, the sun came out with the fierceness of late Summer. Pauline went with Margaret and Monica for a walk in the cornfields, because she and Guy, although it was one of their trysting days, had each resolved to keep it strictly empty of the other's company, so that after a kind of fast they should meet on the great day itself with a deeper welcome. Pauline made a wreath of poppies for Margaret and for Monica a wreath of cornflowers; but her sisters could find no flower that became Pauline on this vigil, nor did she mind, for to-morrow was beckoning to her across the wheat and she gladly went ungarlanded. "I wonder why I feel as if this were our last walk together," said Margaret. "Oh, Margaret, how can you say a horrid thing like that," Pauline exclaimed; and to-morrow drooped before her in the dusty path. "No, darling, it's not horrid. But, oh, you don't know how much I mind that in a way the Rectory as it always has been will no longer be the Rectory." Pauline vowed she would go home, not caring on whose wheat she trampled, if Margaret talked any more like that. "I can't think why you want to make me sad," she protested. "What difference after all will this announcement of our engagement bring? I shall wear a ring, that's all!" "But everybody will know you belong to Guy," said Margaret, "instead of to all of us." "Oh, my dears, my dears," Pauline vowed. "I shall always belong to you as well. Don't make me feel unhappy." "You don't really feel unhappy," said Monica in her wise way. "Because every morning I can hear you singing to yourself long before you ought to be awake." Then her sisters kissed her, and through the golden cornfields they walked silently home. When Pauline was in bed that night her mother lingered after Margaret and Monica had left her room. "Are you glad, darling, you are going to give Guy such a charming birthday present to-morrow?" she asked. "It's your present," said Pauline. "Because I couldn't possibly give myself unless you wanted me to. You know that, don't you, Mother? You do know that, don't you?" "I want you to be my happy Pauline," her mother whispered. "And I think that with Guy you will be my happy Pauline."