g July--and his heart torn; yearning strong in him; hope high
in him yet with its eyes cast down, as if ashamed. The miserable task
before him! If Fleur was desperate, so was he--watching the poplars
swaying, the white clouds passing, the sunlight on the grass.

He waited till evening, till after their almost silent dinner, till his
mother had played to him and still he waited, feeling that she knew what
he was waiting to say. She kissed him and went up-stairs, and still he
lingered, watching the moonlight and the moths, and that unreality of
colouring which steals along and stains a summer night. And he would
have given anything to be back again in the past--barely three months
back; or away forward, years, in the future. The present with this
dark cruelty of a decision, one way or the other, seemed impossible.
He realised now so much more keenly what his mother felt than he had
at first; as if the story in that letter had been a poisonous germ
producing a kind of fever of partisanship, so that he really felt there
were two camps, his mother's and his--Fleur's and her father's. It might
be a dead thing, that old tragic ownership and enmity, but dead things
were poisonous till time had cleaned them away. Even his love felt
tainted, less illusioned, more of the earth, and with a treacherous
lurking doubt lest Fleur, like her father, might want to own; not
articulate, just a stealing haunt, horribly unworthy, which crept in and
about the ardour of his memories, touched with its tarnishing breath the
vividness and grace of that charmed face and figure--a doubt, not real
enough to convince him of its presence, just real enough to deflower a
perfect faith. And perfect faith, to Jon, not yet twenty, was essential.
He still had Youth's eagerness to give with both hands, to take with
neither--to give lovingly to one who had his own impulsive generosity.
Surely she had! He got up from the window-seat and roamed in the big
grey ghostly room, whose walls were hung with silvered canvas. This
house his father said in that death-bed letter--had been built for
his mother to live in--with Fleur's father! He put out his hand in the
half-dark, as if to grasp the shadowy hand of the dead. He clenched,
trying to feel the thin vanished fingers of his father; to squeeze them,
and reassure him that he--he was on his father's side. Tears, prisoned
within him, made his eyes feel dry and hot. He went back to the window.
It was warmer, not so eeri