cascading over and behind the light wheels with fascination--it
looked so cool and fresh. The click and swish blended with the rustle of
the willows and the poplars, and the cooing of a wood-pigeon, in a
true river song. Alongside, in the deep green water, weeds, like yellow
snakes, were writhing and nosing with the current; pied cattle on the
farther side stood in the shade lazily swishing their tails. It was
an afternoon to dream. And she took out Jon's letters--not flowery
effusions, but haunted in their recital of things seen and done by a
longing very agreeable to her, and all ending "Your devoted J." Fleur
was not sentimental, her desires were ever concrete and concentrated,
but what poetry there was in the daughter of Soames and Annette had
certainly in those weeks of waiting gathered round her memories of Jon.
They all belonged to grass and blossom, flowers and running water. She
enjoyed him in the scents absorbed by her crinkling nose. The stars
could persuade her that she was standing beside him in the centre of the
map of Spain; and of an early morning the dewy cobwebs, the hazy sparkle
and promise of the day down in the garden, were Jon personified to her.

Two white swans came majestically by, while she was reading his letters,
followed by their brood of six young swans in a line, with just so much
water between each tail and head, a flotilla of grey destroyers. Fleur
thrust her letters back, got out her sculls, and pulled up to the
landing-stage. Crossing the lawn, she wondered whether she should tell
her father of June's visit. If he learned of it from the butler, he
might think it odd if she did not. It gave her, too, another chance to
startle out of him the reason of the feud. She went, therefore, up the
road to meet him.

Soames had gone to look at a patch of ground on which the Local
Authorities were proposing to erect a Sanatorium for people with weak
lungs. Faithful to his native individualism, he took no part in local
affairs, content to pay the rates which were always going up. He could
not, however, remain indifferent to this new and dangerous scheme. The
site was not half a mile from his own house. He was quite of opinion
that the country should stamp out tuberculosis; but this was not the
place. It should be done farther away. He took, indeed, an attitude
common to all true Forsytes, that disability of any sort in other
people was not his affair, and the State should do its business without
pr