was over by the time one was ten! He came to
the pond, where flies and gnats were dancing over a bright reedy surface;
and on into the coppice. It was cool there, fragrant of larches. Still
no Jon! He called. No answer! On the log seat he sat down, nervous,
anxious, forgetting his own physical sensations. He had been wrong to
let the boy get away with that letter; he ought to have kept him under
his eye from the start! Greatly troubled, he got up to retrace his
steps. At the farm-buildings he called again, and looked into the dark
cow-house. There in the cool, and the scent of vanilla and ammonia, away
from flies, the three Alderneys were chewing the quiet cud; just milked,
waiting for evening, to be turned out again into the lower field. One
turned a lazy head, a lustrous eye; Jolyon could see the slobber on its
grey lower lip. He saw everything with passionate clearness, in the
agitation of his nerves--all that in his time he had adored and tried to
paint--wonder of light and shade and colour. No wonder the legend put
Christ into a manger--what more devotional than the eyes and moon-white
horns of a chewing cow in the warm dusk! He called again. No answer!
And he hurried away out of the coppice, past the pond, up the hill.
Oddly ironical--now he came to think of it--if Jon had taken the gruel of
his discovery down in the coppice where his mother and Bosinney in those
old days had made the plunge of acknowledging their love. Where he
himself, on the log seat the Sunday morning he came back from Paris, had
realised to the full that Irene had become the world to him. That would
have been the place for Irony to tear the veil from before the eyes of
Irene's boy! But he was not here! Where had he got to? One must find
the poor chap!

A gleam of sun had come, sharpening to his hurrying senses all the beauty
of the afternoon, of the tall trees and lengthening shadows, of the blue,
and the white clouds, the scent of the hay, and the cooing of the
pigeons; and the flower shapes standing tall. He came to the rosery, and
the beauty of the roses in that sudden sunlight seemed to him unearthly.
"Rose, you Spaniard!" Wonderful three words! There she had stood by
that bush of dark red roses; had stood to read and decide that Jon must
know it all! He knew all now! Had she chosen wrong? He bent and
sniffed a rose, its petals brushed his nose and trembling lips; nothing
so soft as a rose-leaf's velvet, except h