In the drawing-room Mrs. Grey, Monica, and Margaret all seemed anxious to show their pleasure in Pauline's happiness; and Guy in the assurance this old house gave him of a smooth course for his love ceased to worry any longer about parental problems and was content to live in the merry and intimate present. He realized how far he was advanced in his relation to the family when Brydone, the doctor's son, came in to call. Guy took a malicious delight in his stilted talk, as for half an hour he tried to explain to Monica, a grave and abstracted listener, how the pike would in March go up the ditches and the shallow backwaters, and what great sport it was to snare them with a copper noose suspended from a long pole. There was, too, that triumphant moment he had long desired, when Brydone, rising to take his leave, asked if Guy were coming and when he was able to reply casually that he was not coming just yet. After tea Guy and Pauline, as if by an impulse that occurred to both of them simultaneously, begged Margaret to come and talk in the nursery. She seemed pleased that they wanted her; and the three of them spent the time till dinner in looking at the old familiar things of childhood--at photographs of Monica and Margaret and Pauline in short frocks; at tattered volumes scrawled in by the fingers of little girls. "I wish I'd known you when you were small," sighed Guy. "How wasted all these years seem." The gong went suddenly, and Margaret said that of course to-night he would stay to dinner. So once again he was staying to dinner, and now on such terms as would make this an occasion difficult to forget. As he waited alone in the lamplit nursery, while Margaret and Pauline were dressing, he kissed Pauline in each faded picture stuck in those gay scrap-books of Varese. Nor did he feel the least ashamed of himself, although at Oxford his cynicism had been the admiration even of Balliol, where there had been no one like him for tearing sentiment into dishonored rags. When the Rector came in to dinner, carrying with him a dusty botanical folio that swept all the glass and silver from his end of the table to huddle in the center, Guy tried to make out if he were very much depressed by his not having yet gone home. "Dear me," said the Rector, "I was sure I had seen it in here." "Seen what, Francis?" asked his wife. "A plant you wouldn't know. A Cilician crocus. "Isn't Father sweet?" said Pauline. "Because, of course, Mother never knows any plant." "What nonsense, Pauline! Of course I know a crocus." Towards the end of dinner Mrs. Grey said, rather nervously: "Francis dear, wouldn't you like to drink Pauline's health?" "Why, with pleasure," said the Rector. "Though she looks very well." Pauline jumped in her chair with delight at this, but Mrs. Grey waved her into silence and said: "And Guy's health, too?" The Rector courteously saluted him; but the guest feared there was an undernote of irony in the bow.