an hour, a second and third time.  It was not Fleur, of course, but like enough to give him heartache—­so dear to lovers—­remembering her standing at the foot of his bed with her hand held above her head.  To keep a postcard reproduction of this picture in his pocket and slip it out to look at became for Jon one of those bad habits which soon or late disclose themselves to eyes sharpened by love, fear, or jealousy.  And his mother’s were sharpened by all three.  In Granada he was fairly caught, sitting on a sun-warmed stone bench in a little battlemented garden on the Alhambra hill, whence he ought to have been looking at the view.  His mother, he had thought, was examining the potted stocks between the polled acacias, when her voice said: 

“Is that your favourite Goya, Jon?”

He checked, too late, a movement such as he might have made at school to conceal some surreptitious document, and answered:  “Yes.”

“It certainly is most charming; but I think I prefer the ‘Quitasol’ Your father would go crazy about Goya; I don’t believe he saw them when he was in Spain in ’92.”

In ’92—­nine years before he had been born!  What had been the previous existences of his father and his mother?  If they had a right to share in his future, surely he had a right to share in their pasts.  He looked up at her.  But something in her face—­a look of life hard-lived, the mysterious impress of emotions, experience, and suffering-seemed, with its incalculable depth, its purchased sanctity, to make curiosity impertinent.  His mother must have had a wonderfully interesting life; she was so beautiful, and so—­so—­but he could not frame what he felt about her.  He got up, and stood gazing down at the town, at the plain all green with crops, and the ring of mountains glamorous in sinking sunlight.  Her life was like the past of this old Moorish city, full, deep, remote—­his own life as yet such a baby of a thing, hopelessly ignorant and innocent!  They said that in those mountains to the West, which rose sheer from the blue-green plain, as if out of a sea, Phoenicians had dwelt—­a dark, strange, secret race, above the land!  His mother’s life was as unknown to him, as secret, as that Phoenician past was to the town down there, whose cocks crowed and whose children played and clamoured so gaily, day in, day out.  He felt aggrieved that she should know all about him and he nothing about her except that she loved him and his father, and was beautiful.  His callow ignorance—­he had not even had the advantage of the War, like nearly everybody else!—­made him small in his own eyes.

That night, from the balcony of his bedroom, he gazed down on the roof of the town—­as if inlaid with honeycomb of jet, ivory, and gold; and, long after, he lay awake, listening to the cry of the sentry as the hours struck, and forming in his head these lines: 

     “Voice in the night crying, down in the old sleeping
      Spanish city darkened under her white stars!