wful letter!

Property! Could there be men who looked on women as their property?
Faces seen in street and countryside came thronging up before him--red,
stock-fish faces; hard, dull faces; prim, dry faces; violent faces;
hundreds, thousands of them! How could he know what men who had such
faces thought and did? He held his head in his hands and groaned. His
mother! He caught up the letter and read on again: "horror and
aversion-alive in her to-day.... your children.... grandchildren.... of
a man who once owned your mother as a man might own a slave...." He got
up from his bed. This cruel shadowy past, lurking there to murder his
love and Fleur's, was true, or his father could never have written it.
'Why didn't they tell me the first thing,' he thought, 'the day I first
saw Fleur? They knew I'd seen her. They were afraid,
and--now--I've--got it!' Overcome by misery too acute for thought or
reason, he crept into a dusky corner of the room and sat down on the
floor. He sat there, like some unhappy little animal. There was comfort
in dusk, and the floor--as if he were back in those days when he played
his battles sprawling all over it. He sat there huddled, his hair
ruffled, his hands clasped round his knees, for how long he did not know.
He was wrenched from his blank wretchedness by the sound of the door
opening from his mother's room. The blinds were down over the windows of
his room, shut up in his absence, and from where he sat he could only
hear a rustle, her footsteps crossing, till beyond the bed he saw her
standing before his dressing-table. She had something in her hand. He
hardly breathed, hoping she would not see him, and go away. He saw her
touch things on the table as if they had some virtue in them, then face
the window-grey from head to foot like a ghost. The least turn of her
head, and she must see him! Her lips moved: "Oh! Jon!" She was speaking
to herself; the tone of her voice troubled Jon's heart. He saw in her
hand a little photograph. She held it toward the light, looking at
it--very small. He knew it--one of himself as a tiny boy, which she
always kept in her bag. His heart beat fast. And, suddenly as if she had
heard it, she turned her eyes and saw him. At the gasp she gave, and the
movement of her hands pressing the photograph against her breast, he
said:

"Yes, it's me."

She moved over to the bed, and sat down on it, quite close to him, her
hands still clasping her br