ptured. Jack Cardigan called it "stunning,"
"ripping," "topping," and "corking."

Monsieur Profond, smiling with his eyes, said: "That's a nice small
dress!" Her mother, very handsome in black, sat looking at her, and said
nothing. It remained for her father to apply the test of common sense.
"What did you put on that thing for? You're not going to dance."

Fleur spun round, and the bells pealed.

"Caprice!"

Soames stared at her, and, turning away, gave his arm to Winifred. Jack
Cardigan took her mother. Prosper Profond took Imogen. Fleur went in by
herself, with her bells jingling....

The "small" moon had soon dropped down, and May night had fallen soft and
warm, enwrapping with its grape-bloom colour and its scents the billion
caprices, intrigues, passions, longings, and regrets of men and women.
Happy was Jack Cardigan who snored into Imogen's white shoulder, fit as a
flea; or Timothy in his "mausoleum," too old for anything but baby's
slumber. For so many lay awake, or dreamed, teased by the criss-cross of
the world.

The dew fell and the flowers closed; cattle grazed on in the river
meadows, feeling with their tongues for the grass they could not see; and
the sheep on the Downs lay quiet as stones. Pheasants in the tall trees
of the Pangbourne woods, larks on their grassy nests above the gravel-pit
at Wansdon, swallows in the eaves at Robin Hill, and the sparrows of
Mayfair, all made a dreamless night of it, soothed by the lack of wind.
The Mayfly filly, hardly accustomed to her new quarters, scraped at her
straw a little; and the few night-flitting things--bats, moths,
owls--were vigorous in the warm darkness; but the peace of night lay in
the brain of all day-time Nature, colourless and still. Men and women,
alone, riding the hobby-horses of anxiety or love, burned their wavering
tapers of dream and thought into the lonely hours.

Fleur, leaning out of her window, heard the hall clock's muffled chime of
twelve, the tiny splash of a fish, the sudden shaking of an aspen's
leaves in the puffs of breeze that rose along the river, the distant
rumble of a night train, and time and again the sounds which none can put
a name to in the darkness, soft obscure expressions of uncatalogued
emotions from man and beast, bird and machine, or, maybe, from departed
Forsytes, Darties, Cardigans, taking night strolls back into a world
which had once suited their embodied spirits. But Fleur heeded not these
sounds