"Right O," said Brydone. "We'll tootle off." But it took ten minutes to get them out of the house, and when at last they disappeared into the mazy garden Guy was in a fume of anxiety about his tryst. He could not now go round by Rectory Lane, as he had intended at first. No doubt Brydone and Willsher would stay talking half-an-hour on the bridge, for the rain had stopped and they had given the impression of having the night before them. In fact Brydone had once definitely announced that the night was still young. Yet in a way the fact of their nearness and of his having to avoid them added a zest to the adventure. How dark it was and how heavily the trees dripped in the orchard. Guy pulled the canoe from the shed and dragged it squeaking over the wet grass: not even he in the exaltation of the moment was going to swim the Hellespont. When he was in the canoe and driving it with silent strokes along the straight black stream; when the lantern was put out and the darkness was at first so thick that like the water it seemed to resist the sweep of his paddle, Guy could no longer imagine that Pauline would venture out. He became oppressed by the impenetrable and humid air, and he began to long for rain to fall as if it would reassure him that nature in such an annihilation of form was still alive. Now he had swung past the overhanging willows of the churchyard; his eyes grown accustomed to the darkness discovered against a vague sky the vague bulk of the church, and in a minute or two he could be sure that he was come to the Rectory paddock. He was wet to the knees and his feet, sagging in the grass, seemed to make a most prodigious noise with their gurgling. Guy was too early when he crept over the lawn, for there were still lights in all the upper windows, and he withdrew to the plantation, where he waited in rapt patience while the branches dripped and pattered, dripped and pattered ceaselessly. One by one the lights had faded out, but still he must not signal to Pauline. How should he after all make known to her his presence on that dark lawn? Scarcely would she perceive from her window his shadowy form. He must not even whisper; he must not strike a match. Suddenly a light crossed his vision and he started violently before he realized that it was only a glow-worm moving with laborious progress along the damp edge of the lawn. Black indeed was the hour when a glow-worm belated on this drear night of the year's decline could so alarm him. For a while he watched the creeping phosphorescence and wondered at it in kindly fellowship, thinking how like it was to a human lover, so small and solitary in this gigantic gloom. Then he began to pick it up and, as it moved across his hand and gave it with the wan fire a ghostly semblance, he resolved to signal with this lamp to Pauline.