"lame duck" painters; affectionate as a son of
his father and his mother naturally would be. And yet, in his inner
tissue, there was something of the old founder of his family, a secret
tenacity of soul, a dread of showing his feelings, a determination not to
know when he was beaten. Sensitive, imaginative, affectionate boys get a
bad time at school, but Jon had instinctively kept his nature dark, and
been but normally unhappy there. Only with his mother had he, up till
then, been absolutely frank and natural; and when he went home to Robin
Hill that Saturday his heart was heavy because Fleur had said that he
must not be frank and natural with her from whom he had never yet kept
anything, must not even tell her that they had met again, unless he found
that she knew already. So intolerable did this seem to him that he was
very near to telegraphing an excuse and staying up in London. And the
first thing his mother said to him was:

"So you've had our little friend of the confectioner's there, Jon. What
is she like on second thoughts?"

With relief, and a high colour, Jon answered:

"Oh! awfully jolly, Mum."

Her arm pressed his.

Jon had never loved her so much as in that minute which seemed to falsify
Fleur's fears and to release his soul. He turned to look at her, but
something in her smiling face--something which only he perhaps would have
caught--stopped the words bubbling up in him. Could fear go with a smile?
If so, there was fear in her face. And out of Jon tumbled quite other
words, about farming, Holly, and the Downs. Talking fast, he waited for
her to come back to Fleur. But she did not. Nor did his father mention
her, though of course he, too, must know. What deprivation, and killing
of reality was in his silence about Fleur--when he was so full of her;
when his mother was so full of Jon, and his father so full of his mother!
And so the trio spent the evening of that Saturday.

After dinner his mother played; she seemed to play all the things he
liked best, and he sat with one knee clasped, and his hair standing up
where his fingers had run through it. He gazed at his mother while she
played, but he saw Fleur--Fleur in the moonlit orchard, Fleur in the
sunlit gravel-pit, Fleur in that fancy dress, swaying, whispering,
stooping, kissing his forehead. Once, while he listened, he forgot
himself and glanced at his father in that other easy chair. What was Dad
looking like that for? The expressio