ure. 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:

"So you've had our little friend of the confec