uch as the winds of Spring must have, trying their first songs among
the coming blossom. Jon was one of those boys (not many) in whom a
home-trained love of beauty had survived school life. He had had to
keep it to himself, of course, so that not even the drawing-master knew
of it; but it was there, fastidious and clear within him. And his poem
seemed to him as lame and stilted as the night was winged. But he kept
it all the same. It was a "beast," but better than nothing as an
expression of the inexpressible. And he thought with a sort of
discomfiture: 'I shan't be able to show it to Mother.' He slept
terribly well, when he did sleep, overwhelmed by novelty.

VII

FLEUR

To avoid the awkwardness of questions which could not be answered, all
that had been told Jon was: "There's a girl coming down with Val for
the week-end."

For the same reason, all that had been told Fleur was: "We've got a
youngster staying with us."

The two yearlings, as Val called them in his thoughts, met therefore in
a manner which for unpreparedness left nothing to be desired. They were
thus introduced by Holly:

"This is Jon, my little brother; Fleur's a cousin of ours, Jon."

Jon, who was coming in through a French window out of strong sunlight,
was so confounded by the providential nature of this miracle, that he
had time to hear Fleur say calmly: "Oh, how do you do?" as if he had
never seen her, and to understand dimly from the quickest imaginable
little movement of her head that he never HAD seen her. He bowed
therefore over her hand in an intoxicated manner, and became more
silent than the grave. He knew better than to speak. Once in his early
life, surprised reading by a night-light, he had said fatuously "I was
just turning over the leaves, Mum," and his mother had replied: "Jon,
never tell stories, because of your face--nobody will ever believe
them."

The saying had permanently undermined the confidence necessary to the
success of spoken untruth. He listened therefore to Fleur's swift and
rapt allusions to the jolliness of everything, plied her with scones
and jam, and got away as soon as might be. They say that in delirium
tremens you see a fixed object, preferably dark, which suddenly changes
shape and position. Jon saw the fixed object; it had dark eyes and
passably dark hair, and changed its position, but never its shape. The
knowledge that between him and that object there was already a secret
understanding (how