“Not the faintest.”

“Well, thank heaven he’s no turn for wheels or engines!  I can bear anything but that.  But I wish he’d take more interest in Nature.”

“He’s imaginative, Jolyon.”

“Yes, in a sanguinary way.  Does he love anyone just now?”

“No; only everyone.  There never was anyone born more loving or more lovable than Jon.”

“Being your boy, Irene.”

At this moment little Jon, lying along a branch high above them, brought them down with two peas; but that fragment of talk lodged, thick, in his small gizzard.  Loving, lovable, imaginative, sanguinary!

The leaves also were thick by now, and it was time for his birthday, which, occurring every year on the twelfth of May, was always memorable for his chosen dinner of sweetbread, mushrooms, macaroons, and ginger beer.

Between that eighth birthday, however, and the afternoon when he stood in the July radiance at the turning of the stairway, several important things had happened.

“Da,” worn out by washing his knees, or moved by that mysterious instinct which forces even nurses to desert their nurslings, left the very day after his birthday in floods of tears “to be married”—­of all things—­“to a man.”  Little Jon, from whom it had been kept, was inconsolable for an afternoon.  It ought not to have been kept from him!  Two large boxes of soldiers and some artillery, together with The Young Buglers, which had been among his birthday presents, cooperated with his grief in a sort of conversion, and instead of seeking adventures in person and risking his own life, he began to play imaginative games, in which he risked the lives of countless tin soldiers, marbles, stones and beans.  Of these forms of “chair a canon” he made collections, and, using them alternately, fought the Peninsular, the Seven Years, the Thirty Years, and other wars, about which he had been reading of late in a big History of Europe which had been his grandfather’s.  He altered them to suit his genius, and fought them all over the floor in his day nursery, so that nobody could come in, for fearing of disturbing Gustavus Adolphus, King of Sweden, or treading on an army of Austrians.  Because of the sound of the word he was passionately addicted to the Austrians, and finding there were so few battles in which they were successful he had to invent them in his games.  His favourite generals were Prince Eugene, the Archduke Charles and Wallenstein.  Tilly and Mack ("music-hall turns” he heard his father call them one day, whatever that might mean) one really could not love very much, Austrian though they were.  For euphonic reasons, too, he doted on Turenne.