“Why do you want to know?”

The girl smelled at her roses.  “I only want to know because they won’t tell me.”

“Well, it was about property, but there’s more than one kind.”

“That makes it worse.  Now I really must know.”

June’s small and resolute face quivered.  She was wearing a round cap, and her hair had fluffed out under it.  She looked quite young at that moment, rejuvenated by encounter.

“You know,” she said, “I saw you drop your handkerchief.  Is there anything between you and Jon?  Because, if so, you’d better drop that too.”

The girl grew paler, but she smiled.

“If there were, that isn’t the way to make me.”

At the gallantry of that reply, June held out her hand.

“I like you; but I don’t like your father; I never have.  We may as well be frank.”

“Did you come down to tell him that?”

June laughed.  “No; I came down to see you.”

“How delightful of you.”

This girl could fence.

“I’m two and a half times your age,” said June, “but I quite sympathize.  It’s horrid not to have one’s own way.”

The girl smiled again.  “I really think you might tell me.”

How the child stuck to her point

“It’s not my secret.  But I’ll see what I can do, because I think both you and Jon ought to be told.  And now I’ll say good-bye.”

“Won’t you wait and see Father?”

June shook her head.  “How can I get over to the other side?”

“I’ll row you across.”

“Look!” said June impulsively, “next time you’re in London, come and see me.  This is where I live.  I generally have young people in the evening.  But I shouldn’t tell your father that you’re coming.”

The girl nodded.

Watching her scull the skiff across, June thought:  ’She’s awfully pretty and well made.  I never thought Soames would have a daughter as pretty as this.  She and Jon would make a lovely couple.

The instinct to couple, starved within herself, was always at work in June.  She stood watching Fleur row back; the girl took her hand off a scull to wave farewell, and June walked languidly on between the meadows and the river, with an ache in her heart.  Youth to youth, like the dragon-flies chasing each other, and love like the sun warming them through and through.  Her youth!  So long ago—­when Phil and she—­And since?  Nothing—­no one had been quite what she had wanted.  And so she had missed it all.  But what a coil was round those two young things, if they really were in love, as Holly would have it—­as her father, and Irene, and Soames himself seemed to dread.  What a coil, and what a barrier!  And the itch for the future, the contempt, as it were, for what was overpast, which forms the active principle, moved in the heart of one who ever believed that what one wanted was more important than what other people did