y-brown mountains of a
fascinating land.

It was already hot, and they enjoyed an absence of their compatriots.
Jon, who, so far as he knew, had no blood in him which was not English,
was often innately unhappy in the presence of his own countrymen. He
felt they had no nonsense about them, and took a more practical view of
things than himself. He confided to his mother that he must be an
unsociable beast--it was jolly to be away from everybody who could talk
about the things people did talk about. To which Irene had replied
simply:

"Yes, Jon, I know."

In this isolation he had unparalleled opportunities of appreciating what
few sons can apprehend, the whole-heartedness of a mother's love.
Knowledge of something kept from her made him, no doubt, unduly
sensitive; and a Southern people stimulated his admiration for her type
of beauty, which he had been accustomed to hear called Spanish, but which
he now perceived to be no such thing. Her beauty was neither English,
French, Spanish, nor Italian--it was special! He appreciated, too, as
never before, his mother's subtlety of instinct. He could not tell, for
instance, whether she had noticed his absorption in that Goya picture,
"La Vendimia," or whether she knew that he had slipped back there after
lunch and again next morning, to stand before it full half an hour, a
second and third time. It was not Fleur, of course, but like enough to
give him heartache--so dear to lovers--remembering her standing at the
foot of his bed with her hand held above her head. To keep a postcard
reproduction of this picture in his pocket and slip it out to look at
became for Jon one of those bad habits which soon or late disclose
themselves to eyes sharpened by love, fear, or jealousy. And his
mother's were sharpened by all three. In Granada he was fairly caught,
sitting on a sun-warmed stone bench in a little battlemented garden on
the Alhambra hill, whence he ought to have been looking at the view. His
mother, he had thought, was examining the potted stocks between the
polled acacias, when her voice said:

"Is that your favourite Goya, Jon?"

He checked, too late, a movement such as he might have made at school to
conceal some surreptitious document, and answered: "Yes."

"It certainly is most charming; but I think I prefer the 'Quitasol' Your
father would go crazy about Goya; I don't believe he saw them when he was
in Spain in '92."

In '92--nine years before he had been bo