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 breast, her feet among the sheets of the letter
which had slipped to the floor. She saw them, and her hands grasped the
edge of the bed. She sat very upright, her dark eyes fixed on him. At
last she spoke.

"Well, Jon, you know, I see."

"Yes."