She ought, of course, to be delighted, but what was there to be delighted at?  Her father didn’t really care!  Her mother did, perhaps?  She entered the orchard, and sat down under a cherry-tree.  A breeze sighed in the higher boughs; the sky seen through their green was very blue and very white in cloud—­those heavy white clouds almost always present in river landscape.  Bees, sheltering out of the wind, hummed softly, and over the lush grass fell the thick shade from those fruit-trees planted by her father five-and-twenty, years ago.  Birds were almost silent, the cuckoos had ceased to sing, but wood-pigeons were cooing.  The breath and drone and cooing of high summer were not for long a sedative to her excited nerves.  Crouched over her knees she began to scheme.  Her father must be made to back her up.  Why should he mind so long as she was happy?  She had not lived for nearly nineteen years without knowing that her future was all he really cared about.  She had, then, only to convince him that her future could not be happy without Jon.  He thought it a mad fancy.  How foolish the old were, thinking they could tell what the young felt!  Had not he confessed that he—­when young—­had loved with a grand passion?  He ought to understand!  ’He piles up his money for me,’ she thought; ‘but what’s the use, if I’m not going to be happy?’ Money, and all it bought, did not bring happiness.  Love only brought that.  The ox-eyed daisies in this orchard, which gave it such a moony look sometimes, grew wild and happy, and had their hour.  ’They oughtn’t to have called me Fleur,’ she mused, ’if they didn’t mean me to have my hour, and be happy while it lasts.’  Nothing real stood in the way, like poverty, or disease—­sentiment only, a ghost from the unhappy past!  Jon was right.  They wouldn’t let you live, these old people!  They made mistakes, committed crimes, and wanted their children to go on paying!  The breeze died away; midges began to bite.  She got up, plucked a piece of honeysuckle, and went in.

It was hot that night.  Both she and her mother had put on thin, pale low frocks.  The dinner flowers were pale.  Fleur was struck with the pale look of everything; her father’s face, her mother’s shoulders; the pale panelled walls, the pale grey velvety carpet, the lamp-shade, even the soup was pale.  There was not one spot of colour in the room, not even wine in the pale glasses, for no one drank it.  What was not pale was black—­her father’s clothes, the butler’s clothes, her retriever stretched out exhausted in the window, the curtains black with a cream pattern.  A moth came in, and that was pale.  And silent was that half-mourning dinner in the heat.

Her father called her back as she was following her mother out.

She sat down beside him at the table, and, unpinning the pale honeysuckle, put it to her nose.

“I’ve been thinking,” he said.

“Yes, dear?”