"Well, Birdwood showed me what I ought to do," said Guy. "But it seemed such a rough method of information that I hadn't the heart to adopt it. You see, as far as I could make out, it consisted of pulling up a cabbage by the root, hitting Graves on the head with it, and then nodding violently. That meant 'clear away these cabbages.' Or if Birdwood wanted to say 'plant broccoli here,' he dug Graves in the ribs with the dibbler and rubbed his nose in the unthinned seedlings." "What does Miss Peasey say?" asked Pauline who was in a state of the highest amusement, because deaf and dumb Graves was one of the villagers who lived under her particular patronage. "Well, at first Miss Peasey was rather huffed, because she thought Graves was mocking her by pretending to be deaf. Now, however, she comes out and watches him at work and hopes that next Spring there'll be a little more variety in the garden." The sunny sparkling weather lasted for a few days after Christmas; and one morning Pauline, walking by herself on Wychford down, met Guy. "I wondered if I should see you," he said. "Did you expect to see me, then?" "Well, I knew you often came here, and this morning I couldn't resist coming here myself." Pauline felt a sudden impulse to run away; and yet most unaccountably the impulse led her into walking along with Guy at a brisk pace over the close-cropped glittering turf. Round them trotted Bob in eddies of endless motion. "Listen," said Guy. "I'm sure I heard a lark singing." They stopped, and Pauline thought that never was there so sweet a silence as here upon the summit of this green down. Guy's lark could not be heard. There was not even the faint wind that sighs across high country. There was nothing but gorse and turf and a turquoise sky floating on silver deeps and distances above the winter landscape. "When the gorse is out of bloom, kissing's out of fashion," he said, pointing to a golden spray. Pauline had heard the jingle often enough, but spoken solemnly like this by Guy on Wychford down it flooded her cheeks with blushes, and in a sort of dear alarm the truth of it declared itself. She was startlingly aware of a new life, as it were demanding all sorts of questions of her. She felt a shyness that nearly drove her to run away from her companion and yet at the same moment brought a complete incapacity for movement of any kind, an incapacity too that was full of rapture. She longed for him to say something of such convincing ordinariness as would break the spell and prove to her that she was still Pauline Grey; while with all her desire for the spell to be broken, she was wondering if every moment she were not deliberately offering herself to enchantment. "Have you ever felt," Guy was asking, "a long time after you've met somebody, as if you had suddenly met them again for the first time?" Pauline shook her head vaguely. Then with an effort she recaptured her old self and said laughing: