s special! He appreciated,
too, as never before, his mother's subtlety of instinct. He could not
tell, for instance, whether she had noticed his absorption in that Goya
picture, "La Vendimia," or whether she knew that he had slipped back
there after lunch and again next morning, to stand before it full half
an hour, a second and third time. It was not Fleur, of course, but like
enough to give him heartache--so dear to lovers--remembering her
standing at the foot of his bed with her hand held above her head. To
keep a postcard reproduction of this picture in his pocket and slip it
out to look at became for Jon one of those bad habits which soon or
late disclose themselves to eyes sharpened by love, fear, or jealousy.
And his mother's were sharpened by all three. In Granada he was fairly
caught, sitting on a sun-warmed stone bench in a little battlemented
garden on the Alhambra hill, whence he ought to have been looking at
the view. His mother, he had thought, was examining the potted stocks
between the polled acacias, when her voice said:

"Is that your favourite Goya, Jon?"

He checked, too late, a movement such as he might have made at school
to conceal some surreptitious document, and answered: "Yes."

"It certainly is most charming; but I think I prefer the 'Quitasol.'
Your father would go crazy about Goya; I don't believe he saw them when
he was in Spain in '92."

In '92--nine years before he had been born! What had been the previous
existences of his father and his mother? If they had a right to share
in his future, surely he had a right to share in their pasts. He looked
up at her. But something in her face--a look of life hard-lived, the
mysterious impress of emotions, experience, and suffering--seemed with
its incalculable depth, its purchased sanctity, to make curiosity
impertinent. His mother must have had a wonderfully interesting life;
she was so beautiful, and so--so--but he could not frame what he felt
about her. He got up, and stood gazing down at the town, at the plain
all green with crops, and the ring of mountains glamorous in sinking
sunlight. Her life was like the past of this old Moorish city, full,
deep, remote--his own life as yet such a baby of a thing, hopelessly
ignorant and innocent! They said that in those mountains to the west,
which rose sheer from the blue-green plain, as if out of a sea,
Phoenicians had dwelt--a dark, strange, secret race, above the land!
His mother's life was as unkn