corn and anger.
Once or twice he had seen Annette look like that--the face was too
vivid, too naked, not his daughter's at that moment. And he dared not go
in, realising the futility of any attempt at consolation. He sat down in
the shadow of the ingle-nook.

Monstrous trick, that Fate had played him! Nemesis! That old unhappy
marriage! And in God's name-why? How was he to know, when he wanted
Irene so violently, and she consented to be his, that she would never
love him? The tune died and was renewed, and died again, and still
Soames sat in the shadow, waiting for he knew not what. The fag of
Fleur's cigarette, flung through the window, fell on the grass; he
watched it glowing, burning itself out. The moon had freed herself above
the poplars, and poured her unreality on the garden. Comfortless light,
mysterious, withdrawn--like the beauty of that woman who had never loved
him--dappling the nemesias and the stocks with a vesture not of earth.
Flowers! And his flower so unhappy! Ah! Why could one not put happiness
into Local Loans, gild its edges, insure it against going down?

Light had ceased to flow out now from the drawing-room window. All was
silent and dark in there. Had she gone up? He rose, and, tiptoeing,
peered in. It seemed so! He entered. The verandah kept the moonlight
out; and at first he could see nothing but the outlines of furniture
blacker than the darkness. He groped toward the farther window to shut
it. His foot struck a chair, and he heard a gasp. There she was, curled
and crushed into the corner of the sofa! His hand hovered. Did she want
his consolation? He stood, gazing 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;