e! Her mother did, perhaps?
She entered the orchard, and sat down under a cherry-tree. A breeze
sighed in the higher boughs; the sky seen through their green was very
blue and very white in cloud--those heavy white clouds almost always
present in river landscape. Bees, sheltering out of the wind, hummed
softly, and over the lush grass fell the thick shade from those
fruit-trees planted by her father five-and-twenty years ago. Birds were
almost silent, the cuckoos had ceased to sing, but wood-pigeons were
cooing. The breath and drone and cooing of high summer were not for
long a sedative to her excited nerves. Crouched over her knees she
began to scheme. Her father must be made to back her up. Why should he
mind so long as she was happy? She had not lived for nearly nineteen
years without knowing that her future was all he really cared about.
She had, then, only to convince him that her future could not be happy
without Jon. He thought it a mad fancy. How foolish the old were,
thinking they could tell what the young felt! Had not he confessed that
he--when young--had loved with a grand passion! He ought to understand.
'He piles up his money for me,' she thought; 'but what's the use, if
I'm not going to be happy?' Money, and all it bought, did not bring
happiness. Love only brought that. The ox-eyed daisies in this orchard,
which gave it such a moony look sometimes, grew wild and happy, and had
their hour. 'They oughtn't to have called me Fleur,' she mused, 'if
they didn't mean me to have my hour, and be happy while it lasts.'
Nothing real stood in the way, like poverty, or disease--sentiment
only, a ghost from the unhappy past! Jon was right. They wouldn't let
you live, these old people! They made mistakes, committed crimes, and
wanted their children to go on paying! The breeze died away; midges
began to bite. She got up, plucked a piece of honeysuckle, and went in.

It was hot that night. Both she and her mother had put on thin, pale
low frocks. The dinner flowers were pale. Fleur was struck with the
pale look of everything: her father's face, her mother's shoulders; the
pale panelled walls, the pale-grey velvety carpet, the lamp-shade, even
the soup was pale. There was not one spot of colour in the room, not
even wine in the pale glasses, for no one drank it. What was not pale
was black--her father's clothes, the butler's clothes, her retriever
stretched out exhausted in the window, the curtains black with a cream
patt