Pauline with Michael's arrival began to be moody again; would take no kind of interest in Michael's engagement; would only begin to see again the endless delays that hung so heavily round their marriage. Michael was not at all in the way, for he spent all the time writing to his lady-love, of whom he had told Guy really nothing; or he would sit in the lengthening grass of the orchard and read books of poetry, the pages of which used to wink with lucid reflections caught from the leaves of the fruit-trees overhead. Guy looked over his shoulder and saw that he was reading The Statue and the Bust: _So weeks grew months, years; gleam by gleam_ _The glory dropped from their youth and love,_ _And both perceived they had dreamed a dream;_ "That poem haunts me," exclaimed Guy with a shudder. _Where is the use of the lip's red charm,_ _The heaven of hair, the pride of the brow,_ _And the blood that blues the inside arm--_ _Unless we turn, as the soul knows how,_ _The earthly gift to an end divine?_ "And yet I can't stop reading it," he sighed. _How do their spirits pass, I wonder,_ _Nights and days in the narrow room?_ _Still, I suppose, they sit and ponder_ _What a gift life was, ages ago,_ _Six steps out of the chapel yonder._ On this Summer morning the words wrote themselves in fire across his brain. "They light the way to dusty death," he muttered over and over again, when he had left Browning to Michael and flung himself face downward in the orchard grass. In despair of what a havoc time was making of their youth and their love, that very afternoon he begged Pauline to meet him again now in these dark nights of early Summer, now when soon he would be going away from her. "Going away?" she echoed in alarm. "I suppose that's the result of your friend's visit." Guy, however, was not going to surrender again, and he insisted that when a month had passed he would indeed be gone from Plashers Mead. It was nothing to do with Michael Fane: it was solely his own determination to put an end to this unprofitable dalliance. "But your poems? I thought that when your poems were published everything would be all right." "Oh, my poems," he scoffed. "They're valueless!" "Guy!" "They're mere decoration. They are trifles." "I don't understand you." "I care for nothing but to be married to you. For nothing, do you hear? Pauline, everything is to be subordinate to that. I would even write and beg my father to take me as a junior usher at Fox Hall for that. We must be married soon. I can't bear to see Richard and Margaret sailing along so calmly and quietly toward happiness."