It was a letter of gloriously good news, thought Guy, though he was a little disappointed not to have had the thrill of Pauline's endearment. Then, on the blank outside page, he saw scrawled in writing that went tumbling head over heels down the paper: _My darling Guy, I love you and underneath I have kissed the letter for you._ The sentence died out in faint ink that seemed to show forth the whisper in which it had been written. For Guy the tumbledown letters were written in fire; and with the treasure in his heart of that small sentence, read a hundred times, he did not know how he should endure ten long days without Pauline, and in this old college garden, on this sedate and academic lawn, he cried out that he adored her as if indeed she were beside him in this laylocked air. At the sound of his voice the birds close at hand were all silent: they might have stopped to listen. Then a green-finch called 'sweet! sweet!', whose gentle and persistent proclamation was presently echoed by all the other birds twittering together again in the confused raptures of their Spring. The days with Michael at St. Giles went by slowly enough, and their fairness was a wasted boon. Guy wrote many long letters to Pauline and received from her another letter in which she began with '_My dearest_' as he had begged her. Yet when he read the herald vocative, he wished he had not tried to alter that old abrupt opening, for never again would she write in the faint ink of shyness such a sentence as had tumbled down the back of her first letter. Michael seemed to divine that he was in love, and Guy wondered why he could not tell him about it. Once or twice he nearly brought himself to the point, but the thought of describing Pauline kept him mute: Michael must see her first. The canoe would be ready at the end of the week, and Guy announced he should paddle it up to Wychford, travelling from the Isis to the upper Thames and from the upper Thames turning aside at Oldbridge to follow the romantic course of the Greenrush even to his own windows. "Rather fun," said Michael. "If the weather stays all right." "By Jove," Guy exclaimed, "I believe it was at Oldbridge Inn that I first met you." "On May Day three years ago," Michael agreed.