ound walk, and of all the sad ghosts
that should have haunted his path there was not one who walked now
beside him; for, as he dreamed upon the vision of Pauline, the
melancholy of that forsaken place was lightened with a sort of April
exultation and the promise of new life to gladden the once populous
gardens where lovers might have been merry in the past.

However, when he was back in his house, Guy's earlier mood returned, and
he made up his mind anew not to go to the Rectory. Nothing would do for
him but the metaphysics and passion of Dr. John Donne; and on the dreary
evening when the frost yielded to rain before there had been one day's
skating, Guy was as near as any one may ever have been to conversing
with that old lover's ghost who died before the god of Love was born.
All his plans wore mourning, and the bills that week rose
two-and-sixpence-halfpenny higher than their highest total so far. Guy
moped in his green library and, as he read through the manuscripts of
poetry that with the progress of the night seemed to him worse and
worse, he wished he could recapture some of that self-confidence which
had carried him so serenely through Oxford; and he asked himself if
Pauline's love would endow him once more with that conviction of
ultimate fame, to the former safe tenure of which he now looked back as
from a disillusioned old age.

Another week passed, and Guy wondered what they were thinking of him at
the Rectory for his neglect of all they might justly suppose had been
offered him. Absence from Pauline did not seem to have effected much so
far except a complete paralysis of his power to work with that diligence
he had always preached as the true threshold of art. Perhaps he had been
always a little too insistent upon the merit of academic industry, too
conscious of a deliberate embarkation upon a well-built career, too
careful of mere equipment in his exploration of Parnassus. So long as he
had been exercising his technical accomplishment, everything had seemed
to be advancing securely towards the moment when inspiration should
vitalize the promise of his craftsmanship. Now inspiration was at hand,
and accomplishment had betrayed him. These effusions of restless love
which he had lately produced were surely the most wretched cripples ever
sent to climb the Heliconian slope. Guy looked at his note-book and
marked how many apostrophes, the impulses to declaim which had seemed to
scorch his imagination with brig