The saying had permanently undermined the confidence necessary to the success of spoken untruth.  He listened therefore to Fleur’s swift and rapt allusions to the jolliness of everything, plied her with scones and jam, and got away as soon as might be.  They say that in delirium tremens you see a fixed object, preferably dark, which suddenly changes shape and position.  Jon saw the fixed object; it had dark eyes and passably dark hair, and changed its position, but never its shape.  The knowledge that between him and that object there was already a secret understanding (however impossible to understand) thrilled him so that he waited feverishly, and began to copy out his poem—­which of course he would never dare to—­show her—­till the sound of horses’ hoofs roused him, and, leaning from his window, he saw her riding forth with Val.  It was clear that she wasted no time, but the sight filled him with grief.  He wasted his.  If he had not bolted, in his fearful ecstasy, he might have been asked to go too.  And from his window he sat and watched them disappear, appear again in the chine of the road, vanish, and emerge once more for a minute clear on the outline of the Down.  ‘Silly brute!’ he thought; ‘I always miss my chances.’

Why couldn’t he be self-confident and ready?  And, leaning his chin on his hands, he imagined the ride he might have had with her.  A week-end was but a week-end, and he had missed three hours of it.  Did he know any one except himself who would have been such a flat?  He did not.

He dressed for dinner early, and was first down.  He would miss no more.  But he missed Fleur, who came down last.  He sat opposite her at dinner, and it was terrible—­impossible to say anything for fear of saying the wrong thing, impossible to keep his eyes fixed on her in the only natural way; in sum, impossible to treat normally one with whom in fancy he had already been over the hills and far away; conscious, too, all the time, that he must seem to her, to all of them, a dumb gawk.  Yes, it was terrible!  And she was talking so well—­swooping with swift wing this way and that.  Wonderful how she had learned an art which he found so disgustingly difficult.  She must think him hopeless indeed!

His sister’s eyes, fixed on him with a certain astonishment, obliged him at last to look at Fleur; but instantly her eyes, very wide and eager, seeming to say, “Oh! for goodness’ sake!” obliged him to look at Val, where a grin obliged him to look at his cutlet—­that, at least, had no eyes, and no grin, and he ate it hastily.

“Jon is going to be a farmer,” he heard Holly say; “a farmer and a poet.”

He glanced up reproachfully, caught the comic lift of her eyebrow just like their father’s, laughed, and felt better.