est-invested
Forsytes, put a clue into Fleur's hands. Her father came down to dinner
without a handkerchief, and had occasion to blow his nose.

"I'll get you one, dear," she had said, and run upstairs. In the sachet
where she sought for it--an old sachet of very faded silk--there were
two compartments: one held handkerchiefs; the other was buttoned, and
contained something flat and hard. By some childish impulse Fleur
unbuttoned it. There was a frame and in it a photograph of herself as a
little girl. She gazed at it, fascinated, as one is by one's own
presentment. It slipped under her fidgeting thumb, and she saw that
another photograph was behind. She pressed her own down further, and
perceived a face, which she seemed to know, of a young woman, very
good-looking, in a very old style of evening dress. Slipping her own
photograph up over it again, she took out a handkerchief and went down.
Only on the stairs did she identify that face. Surely--surely Jon's
mother! The conviction came as a shock. And she stood still in a flurry
of thought. Why, of course! Jon's father had married the woman her
father had wanted to marry, had cheated him out of her, perhaps. Then,
afraid of showing by her manner that she had lighted on his secret, she
refused to think further, and, shaking out the silk handkerchief,
entered the dining-room.

"I chose the softest, Father."

"H'm!" said Soames; "I only use those after a cold. Never mind!"

That evening passed for Fleur in putting two and two together;
recalling the look on her father's face in the confectioner's shop--a
look strange, and coldly intimate, a queer look. He must have loved
that woman very much to have kept her photograph all this time, in
spite of having lost her. Unsparing and matter-of-fact, her mind darted
to his relations with her own mother. Had he ever really loved HER? She
thought not. Jon was the son of the woman he had really loved. Surely,
then, he ought not to mind his daughter loving him; it only wanted
getting used to. And a sigh of sheer relief was caught in the folds of
her nightgown slipping over her head.

III

MEETINGS

Youth only recognises Age by fits and starts. Jon, for one, had never
really seen his father's age till he came back from Spain. The face of
the fourth Jolyon, worn by waiting, gave him quite a shock--it looked
so wan and old. His father's mask had been forced awry by the emotion
of the meeting, so that the boy suddenly real