Irene looked up at him.

“We’ve known it would come some day.”

He answered her with sudden energy: 

“I could never stand seeing Jon blame you.  He shan’t do that, even in thought.  He has imagination; and he’ll understand if it’s put to him properly.  I think I had better tell him before he gets to know otherwise.”

“Not yet, Jolyon.”

That was like her—­she had no foresight, and never went to meet trouble.  Still—­who knew?—­she might be right.  It was ill going against a mother’s instinct.  It might be well to let the boy go on, if possible, till experience had given him some touchstone by which he could judge the values of that old tragedy; till love, jealousy, longing, had deepened his charity.  All the same, one must take precautions—­every precaution possible!  And, long after Irene had left him, he lay awake turning over those precautions.  He must write to Holly, telling her that Jon knew nothing as yet of family history.  Holly was discreet, she would make sure of her husband, she would see to it!  Jon could take the letter with him when he went to-morrow.

And so the day on which he had put the polish on his material estate died out with the chiming of the stable clock; and another began for Jolyon in the shadow of a spiritual disorder which could not be so rounded off and polished....

But Jon, whose room had once been his day nursery, lay awake too, the prey of a sensation disputed by those who have never known it, “love at first sight!” He had felt it beginning in him 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 co-educated, 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 downstairs 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