im with the glint of those
dark eyes gazing into his athwart the Juno--a conviction that this was
his 'dream'; so that what followed had seemed to him at once natural
and miraculous. Fleur! Her name alone was almost enough for one who was
terribly susceptible to the charm of words. In a homoeopathic age, when
boys and girls were coeducated, and mixed up in early life till sex was
almost abolished, Jon was singularly old-fashioned. His modern school
took boys only, and his holidays had been spent at Robin Hill with boy
friends, or his parents alone. He had never, therefore, been inoculated
against the germs of love by small doses of the poison. And now in the
dark his temperature was mounting fast. He lay awake, featuring
Fleur--as they called it--recalling her words, especially that "Au
revoir!" so soft and sprightly.

He was still so wide-awake at dawn that he got up, slipped on tennis
shoes, trousers, and a sweater, and in silence crept down-stairs and
out through the study window. It was just light; there was a smell of
grass. 'Fleur!' he thought; 'Fleur!' It was mysteriously white
out-of-doors, with nothing awake except the birds just beginning to
chirp. 'I'll go down into the coppice,' he thought. He ran down through
the fields, reached the pond just as the sun rose, and passed into the
coppice. Bluebells carpeted the ground there; among the larch-trees
there was mystery--the air, as it were, composed of that romantic
quality. Jon sniffed its freshness, and stared at the bluebells in the
sharpening light. Fleur! It rhymed with her! And she lived at
Mapledurham--a jolly name, too, on the river somewhere. He could find
it in the atlas presently. He would write to her. But would she answer?
Oh! She must. She had said "Au revoir!" Not good-bye! What luck that
she had dropped her handkerchief. He would never have known her but for
that. And the more he thought of that handkerchief, the more amazing
his luck seemed. Fleur! It certainly rhymed with her! Rhythm thronged
his head; words jostled to be joined together; he was on the verge of a
poem.

Jon remained in this condition for more than half an hour, then
returned to the house, and getting a ladder, climbed in at his bedroom
window out of sheer exhilaration. Then, remembering that the study
window was open, he went down and shut it, first removing the ladder,
so as to obliterate all traces of his feeling. The thing was too deep
to be revealed to mortal soul--even to