“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 his 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, I think.”

“Is Father like him?”

“A little, but more subtle, and not quite so solid.”

“I know, from grandfather’s portrait; who painted that?”

“One of June’s ‘lame ducks.’  But it’s quite good.”

Jon slipped his hand through his mother’s arm.  “Tell me about the family quarrel, Mum.”

He felt her arm quivering.  “No, dear; that’s for your Father some day, if he thinks fit.”

“Then it was serious,” said Jon, with a catch in his breath.

“Yes.”  And there was a silence, during which neither knew whether the arm or the hand within it were quivering most.