knew already. So
intolerable did this seem to him that he was very near to telegraphing
an excuse and staying up in London. And the first thing his mother said
to him was:

"So you've had our little friend of the confectioner's there, Jon. What
is she like on second thoughts?"

With relief, and a high colour, Jon answered:

"Oh! awfully jolly, Mum."

Her arm pressed his.

Jon had never loved her so much as in that minute which seemed to
falsify Fleur's fears and to release his soul. He turned to look at
her, but something in her smiling face--something which only he perhaps
would have caught--stopped the words bubbling up in him. Could fear go
with a smile? If so, there was fear in her face. And out of Jon tumbled
quite other words, about farming, Holly, and the Downs. Talking fast,
he waited for her to come back to Fleur. But she did not. Nor did his
father mention her, though of course he, too, must know. What
deprivation, and killing of reality was in this silence about
Fleur--when he was so full of her, when his mother was so full of Jon,
and his father so full of his mother! And so the trio spent the evening
of that Saturday.

After dinner his mother played; she seemed to play all the things he
liked best, and he sat with one knee clasped, and his hair standing up
where his fingers had run through it. He gazed at his mother while she
played, but he saw Fleur--Fleur in the moonlit orchard, Fleur in the
sunlit gravel-pit, Fleur in that fancy dress, swaying, whispering,
stooping, kissing his forehead. Once, while he listened, he forgot
himself and glanced at his father in that other easy chair. What was
Dad looking like that for? The expression on his face was so sad and
puzzling. It filled him with a sort of remorse, so that he got up and
went and sat on the arm of his father's chair. From there he could not
see his face; and again he saw Fleur--in his mother's hands, slim and
white on the keys, in the profile of her face and her powdery hair; and
down the long room in the open window where the May night walked
outside.

When he went up to bed his mother came into his room. She stood at the
window, and said:

"Those cypresses your grandfather planted down there have done
wonderfully. I always think they look beautiful under a dropping moon.
I wish you had known your grandfather, Jon."

"Were you married to Father, when he was alive?" asked Jon suddenly.

"No, dear; he died in '92--very old--eighty-five,