he sought for it--an old sachet of very faded silk--there were
two compartments: one held handkerchiefs; the other was buttoned,
and contained something flat and hard. By some childish impulse Fleur
unbuttoned it. There was a frame and in it a photograph of herself as
a little girl. She gazed at it, fascinated, as one is by one's own
presentment. It slipped under her fidgeting thumb, and she saw that
another photograph was behind. She pressed her own down further, and
perceived a face, which she seemed to know, of a young woman, very
good-looking, in a very old style of evening dress. Slipping her own
photograph up over it again, she took out a handkerchief and went down.
Only on the stairs did she identify that face. Surely--surely Jon's
mother! The conviction came as a shock. And she stood still in a flurry
of thought. Why, of course! Jon's father had married the woman her
father had wanted to marry, had cheated him out of her, perhaps. Then,
afraid of showing by her manner that she had lighted on his secret,
she refused to think further, and, shaking out the silk handkerchief,
entered the dining-room.

"I chose the softest, Father."

"H'm!" said Soames; "I only use those after a cold. Never mind!"

That evening passed for Fleur in putting two and two together; recalling
the look on her father's face in the confectioner's shop--a look strange
and coldly intimate, a queer look. He must have loved that woman very
much to have kept her photograph all this time, in spite of having lost
her. Unsparing and matter-of-fact, her mind darted to his relations with
her own mother. Had he ever really loved her? She thought not. Jon was
the son of the woman he had really loved. Surely, then, he ought not to
mind his daughter loving him; it only wanted getting used to. And a sigh
of sheer relief was caught in the folds of her nightgown slipping over
her head.

III.--MEETINGS

Youth only recognises Age by fits and starts. Jon, for one, had never
really seen his father's age till he came back from Spain. The face of
the fourth Jolyon, worn by waiting, gave him quite a shock--it looked
so wan and old. His father's mask had been forced awry by the emotion
of the meeting, so that the boy suddenly realised how much he must have
felt their absence. He summoned to his aid the thought: 'Well, I didn't
want to go!' It was out of date for Youth to defer to Age. But Jon was
by no means typically modern. His father had always been "so