“I wanted to show you my fancy dress,” it said, and struck an attitude at the foot of his bed.

Jon drew a long breath and leaned against the door.  The apparition wore white muslin on its head, a fichu round its bare neck over a wine-coloured dress, fulled out below its slender waist.

It held one arm akimbo, and the other raised, right-angled, holding a fan which touched its head.

“This ought to be a basket of grapes,” it whispered, “but I haven’t got it here.  It’s my Goya dress.  And this is the attitude in the picture.  Do you like it?”

“It’s a dream.”

The apparition pirouetted.  “Touch it, and see.”

Jon knelt down and took the skirt reverently.

“Grape colour,” came the whisper, “all grapes—­La Vendimia—­the vintage.”

Jon’s fingers scarcely touched each side of the waist; he looked up, with adoring eyes.

“Oh!  Jon,” it whispered; bent, kissed his forehead, pirouetted again, and, gliding out, was gone.

Jon stayed on his knees, and his head fell forward against the bed.  How long he stayed like that he did not know.  The little noises—­of the tapping nail, the feet, the skirts rustling—­as in a dream—­went on about him; and before his closed eyes the figure stood and smiled and whispered, a faint perfume of narcissus lingering in the air.  And his forehead where it had been kissed had a little cool place between the brows, like the imprint of a flower.  Love filled his soul, that love of boy for girl which knows so little, hopes so much, would not brush the down off for the world, and must become in time a fragrant memory—­a searing passion—­a humdrum mateship—­or, once in many times, vintage full and sweet with sunset colour on the grapes.

Enough has been said about Jon Forsyte here and in another place to show what long marches lay between him and his great-great-grandfather, the first Jolyon, in Dorset down by the sea.  Jon was sensitive as a girl, more sensitive than nine out of ten girls of the day; imaginative as one of his half-sister June’s “lame duck” painters; affectionate as a son of his father and his mother naturally would be.  And yet, in his inner tissue, there was something of the old founder of his family, a secret tenacity of soul, a dread of showing his feelings, a determination not to know when he was beaten.  Sensitive, imaginative, affectionate boys get a bad time at school, but Jon had instinctively kept his nature dark, and been but normally unhappy there.  Only with his mother had he, up till then, been absolutely frank and natural; and when he went home to Robin Hill that Saturday his heart was heavy because Fleur had said that he must not be frank and natural with her from whom he had never yet kept anything, must not even tell her that they had met again, unless he found that she knew already.  So intolerable did this seem to him that he was very near to telegraphing an excuse and staying up in London.  And the first thing his mother said to him was: