ng at that ball of crushed frills and
hair and graceful youth, trying to burrow its way out of sorrow. How
leave her there? At last he touched her hair, and said:

"Come, darling, better go to bed. I'll make it up to you, somehow." How
fatuous! But what could he have said?

IX

UNDER THE OAK-TREE

When their visitor had disappeared Jon and his mother stood without
speaking, till he said suddenly:

"I ought to have seen him out."

But Soames was already walking down the drive, and Jon went upstairs to
his father's studio, not trusting himself to go back.

The expression on his mother's face confronting the man she had once been
married to, had sealed a resolution growing within him ever since she
left him the night before. It had put the finishing touch of reality.
To marry Fleur would be to hit his mother in the face; to betray his dead
father! It was no good! Jon had the least resentful of natures. He
bore his parents no grudge in this hour of his distress. For one so
young there was a rather strange power in him of seeing things in some
sort of proportion. It was worse for Fleur, worse for his mother even,
than it was for him. Harder than to give up was to be given up, or to be
the cause of some one you loved giving up for you. He must not, would
not behave grudgingly! While he stood watching the tardy sunlight, he had
again that sudden vision of the world which had come to him the night
before. Sea on sea, country on country, millions on millions of people,
all with their own lives, energies, joys, griefs, and suffering--all with
things they had to give up, and separate struggles for existence. Even
though he might be willing to give up all else for the one thing he
couldn't have, he would be a fool to think his feelings mattered much in
so vast a world, and to behave like a cry-baby or a cad. He pictured the
people who had nothing--the millions who had given up life in the War,
the millions whom the War had left with life and little else; the hungry
children he had read of, the shattered men; people in prison, every kind
of unfortunate. And--they did not help him much. If one had to miss a
meal, what comfort in the knowledge that many others had to miss it too?
There was more distraction in the thought of getting away out into this
vast world of which he knew nothing yet. He could not go on staying
here, walled in and sheltered, with everything so slick and comfortable,
and nothing to