t Pauline would venture out.
He became oppressed by the impenetrable and humid air, and he began to
long for rain to fall as if it would reassure him that nature in such an
annihilation of form was still alive. Now he had swung past the
overhanging willows of the churchyard; his eyes, grown accustomed to the
darkness, discovered against a vague sky the vague bulk of the church,
and in a minute or two he could be sure that he was come to the Rectory
paddock. He was wet to the knees, and his feet, sagging in the grass,
seemed to make a most prodigious noise with their gurgling.

Guy was too early when he crept over the lawn, for there were still
lights in all the upper windows, and he withdrew to the plantation,
where he waited in rapt patience while the branches dripped and
pattered, dripped and pattered ceaselessly. One by one the lights had
faded out, but still he must not signal to Pauline. How should he, after
all, make known to her his presence on that dark lawn? Scarcely would
she perceive from her window his shadowy form. He must not even whisper;
he must not strike a match. Suddenly a light crossed his vision, and he
started violently before he realized that it was only a glow-worm
moving with laborious progress along the damp edge of the lawn. Black
indeed was the hour when a glow-worm belated on this drear night of the
year's decline could so alarm him. For a while he watched the creeping
phosphorescence and wondered at it in kindly fellowship, thinking how
like it was to a human lover, so small and solitary in this gigantic
gloom. Then he began to pick it up and, as it moved across his hand and
gave it with the wan fire a ghostly semblance, he resolved to signal
with this lamp to Pauline.

Midnight crashed its tale from the belfry, and nowhere in the long house
was there any light. There was nothing now in the world but himself and
this glow-worm wandering across his hand. He moved nearer to the house
and stood beneath Pauline's window; surely she was leaning out; surely
that was her shadow tremulous on the inspissate air. Guy waved, and the
pale light moving to and fro seemed to exact an answer, for something
fell at his feet, and by the glow-worm's melancholy radiance he read
"_now_" on a piece of paper. Gratefully he set the insect down to vanish
upon its own amorous path into the murk. Not a tree quivered, not a
raindrop slipped from a blade of grass, but Guy held out his arms to
clasp his long-awaited Pa