"Margaret, I've been rather objectionable lately," said Guy, remembering with an access of penitence that it must be almost exactly a year ago that he and Margaret in that snowy weather had first talked about his love for Pauline. "Well, I have thought that you were forgetting me," said Margaret. "I shall be sad if we are never going to be friends again." "Oh, Margaret, we are friends now. I've been worried, and I thought that you had been rather unkind to Pauline." "I haven't really." "Of course not. It was absolutely my fault," Guy admitted. "Now that there seems a chance of our being married in less than ten years, I'm going to give up this continual exasperation in which I live nowadays. It's curious that my first impression of you all should have been as of a Mozart symphony, so tranquil and gay and self-contained and perfectly made did the Rectory seem. How clumsily I have plunged into that life," he sighed. "Really, Margaret, I feel sometimes like a wild beast that's escaped from a menagerie and got into a concert of chamber-music. Look here, you shall never have to grumble at me again. Now tell me, just to show that you've forgiven my detestable irruption ... when Richard comes back...." Margaret gave him her hand for a moment, and looked down. "And you're happy?" he asked eagerly. "I'm sure I shall be." "Oh, you will be, you will be." Pauline asked him afterward what he had said to Margaret that could have made her so particularly sweet, and when Guy whispered his discovery, Pauline declared that the one thing necessary to make this evening perfect had been just that knowledge. "Guy, how clever of you to make her tell you what she will never tell us. You don't know how much it has worried me to feel that you were always angry with Margaret. How I've exaggerated everything! And what friends you really are, you dears!" "I've never been angry with her except on your account." "But you won't ever be again, because I'm so foolish. I'm really a sort of young Miss Verney." They laughed at this idea of Pauline's, and soon it was time for Guy to go. He thought luxuriously as he walked up the drive how large a measure of good news he would bring back with him from London. Guy was surprized to be kept waiting when he enquired for Mr. Worrall at three o'clock on the following afternoon. All the way up in the train he had thought so much about him and so kindlily that it seemed he must the very moment he entered the dusty Georgian antechamber shake his publisher warmly by the hand. He had pictured him really as looking out for his coming, almost as vividly indeed in his prefiguration of the scene as to behold Mr. Worrall's face pressed tight against a pane and thence disappearing to greet him from the step. It was a shock to be invited to wait, and he repeated his name to the indifferent clerk a little insistently. "Mr. Worrall will see you in a minute," the clerk repeated.