akimbo, and the other raised right-angled
holding a fan which touched its head.

"This ought to be a basket of grapes," it whispered, "but I haven't got
it here. It's my Goya dress. And this is the attitude in the picture.
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