dreamed, teased by the
crisscross of the world.

The dew fell and the flowers closed; cattle grazed on in the river
meadows, feeling with their tongues for the grass they could not see;
and the sheep on the Downs lay quiet as stones. Pheasants in the tall
trees of the Pangbourne woods, larks on their grassy nests above the
gravel-pit at Wansdon, swallows in the eaves at Robin Hill, and the
sparrows of Mayfair, all made a dreamless night of it, soothed by the
lack of wind. The Mayfly filly, hardly accustomed to her new quarters,
scraped at her straw a little; and the few night-flitting things--bats,
moths, owls--were vigorous in the warm darkness; but the peace of night
lay in the brain of all day-time Nature, colourless and still. Men and
women, alone, riding the hobbyhorses of anxiety or love, burned their
wavering tapers of dream and thought into the lonely hours.

Fleur, leaning out of her window, heard the hall clock's muffled chime
of twelve, the tiny splash of a fish, the sudden shaking of an aspen's
leaves in the puffs of breeze that rose along the river, the distant
rumble of a night train, and time and again the sounds which none can
put a name to in the darkness, soft obscure expressions of uncatalogued
emotions from man and beast, bird and machine, or, maybe, from departed
Forsytes, Darties, Cardigans, taking night strolls back into a world
which had once suited their embodied spirits. But Fleur heeded not
these sounds, her spirit, far from disembodied, fled with swift wing
from railway-carriage to flowery hedge, straining after Jon, tenacious
of his forbidden image, and the sound of his voice which was taboo. And
she crinkled her nose, retrieving from the perfume of the riverside
night that moment when his hand slipped between the mayflowers and her
cheek. Long she leaned out in her freak dress, keen to burn her wings
at life's candle; while the moths brushed her cheeks on their
pilgrimage to the lamp on her dressing-table, ignorant that in a
Forsyte's house there is no open flame. But at last even she felt
sleepy, and, forgetting her bells, drew quickly in.

Through the open window of his room, alongside Annette's, Soames,
wakeful too, heard their thin faint tinkle, as it might be shaken from
stars, or the dewdrops falling from a flower, if one could hear such
sounds.

'Caprice!' he thought. 'I can't tell. She's wilful. What shall I do?
Fleur!'

And long into the "small" night he brooded.

PAR