On this thought she fell asleep, and woke to a sunny morning, though the sky was a turbid blue across which swollen clouds were steadily moving. She lay watchful, wondering if this quiet time of six o'clock would hold the best of Guy's birthday and if by eight o'clock the sky would not be quite grey. It was a pity she and Guy had not arranged to meet early, so that before the day was spoiled they should have possessed themselves of its prime. Pauline could no longer stay in bed with this sunlight, the lucid shadows of which caught from the wistaria leaves were flickering all about the room. She must go to the window and salute his birthday. Suddenly she recalled something Guy had once said of how he pictured her always moving round her room in the morning like a small white cloud. Blushful at the intimacy of the thought she looked at herself in the glass. "You're his. You're his," she whispered to her image. "Are you a white goose as Margaret said you were? Or are you the least bit like a cloud?" Guy came and knelt by her in church that morning, and she took his action as the sign he offered to the world of holding her now openly. In the great church they were kneeling; rose-fired both of them by the crimson gowns of the high saints along the clerestory; and then Guy slipped upon her finger the new ring he had bought for their engagement, a pink topaz set in the old fashion, which burned there like the heart of the rosy fire in which they knelt suffused. Breakfast was to be in the garden, as all Rectory birthdays were except Monica's which fell in January; and since the day had ripened to a kind of sweet sultriness as of a pear that has hung too long upon a wall, it was grateful to sit in the shade of the weeping-willow by the side of the lily-pond. To each floating cup, tawny or damasked white or deepest cramoisy, the Rector called their attention. Nymphaeas they were to him, fountain divinities that one after the other he flattered with courteous praise. When Guy had been given all his presents, Pauline saw her father put a hand in his coat and pull out a small book. "Father has remembered Guy's birthday," she cried clapping her hands. "Now I do call that wonderful. Francis, you're wonderful. You're really wonderful." "Pauline, Pauline, don't get too excited," her mother begged. "And please don't call your father Francis in the garden." "Propertius," Guy murmured, shyly opening the book; but when he was going to say something about that Roman lover to the Rector, the Rector had vanished. After breakfast Pauline and Guy walked in the inner wall-garden that was now brilliant with ten thousand deep-throated gladioli. "Pauline," said Guy, "this morning I learnt Milton's sonnet on his twenty-third birthday, and I feel rather worried. Listen,