was almost enough for one who was
terribly susceptible to the charm of words. In a homoeopathic Age, when
boys and girls were co-educated, and mixed up in early life till sex was
almost abolished, Jon was singularly old-fashioned. His modern school
took boys only, and his holidays had been spent at Robin Hill with boy
friends, or his parents alone. He had never, therefore, been inoculated
against the germs of love by small doses of the poison. And now in
the dark his temperature was mounting fast. He lay awake, featuring
Fleur--as they called it--recalling her words, especially that "Au
revoir!" so soft and sprightly.

He was still so wide awake at dawn that he got up, slipped on tennis
shoes, trousers, and a sweater, and in silence crept downstairs and out
through the study window. It was just light; there was a smell of grass.
'Fleur!' he thought; 'Fleur!' It was mysteriously white out of doors,
with nothing awake except the birds just beginning to chirp. 'I'll go
down into the coppice,' he thought. He ran down through the fields,
reached the pond just as the sun rose, and passed into the coppice.
Bluebells carpeted the ground there; among the larch-trees there was
mystery--the air, as it were, composed of that romantic quality. Jon
sniffed its freshness, and stared at the bluebells in the sharpening
light. Fleur! It rhymed with her! And she lived at Mapleduram--a
jolly name, too, on the river somewhere. He could find it in the atlas
presently. He would write to her. But would she answer? Oh! She must.
She had said "Au revoir!" Not good-bye! What luck that she had dropped
her handkerchief! He would never have known her but for that. And the
more he thought of that handkerchief, the more amazing his luck seemed.
Fleur! It certainly rhymed with her! Rhythm thronged his head; words
jostled to be joined together; he was on the verge of a poem.

Jon remained in this condition for more than half an hour, then returned
to the house, and getting a ladder, climbed in at his bedroom window out
of sheer exhilaration. Then, remembering that the study window was open,
he went down and shut it, first removing the ladder, so as to obliterate
all traces of his feeling. The thing was too deep to be revealed to
mortal soul-even-to his mother.

IV.--THE MAUSOLEUM

There are houses whose souls have passed into the limbo of Time, leaving
their bodies in the limbo of London. Such was not quite the condition of
"Timothy's" on the