e high in him, yet with its eyes cast down, as if ashamed. The
miserable task before him! If Fleur was desperate, so was he--watching
the poplars swaying, the white clouds passing, the sunlight on the
grass.

He waited till evening, till after their almost silent dinner, till his
mother had played to him--and still he waited, feeling that she knew
what he was waiting to say. She kissed him and went up-stairs, and
still he lingered, watching the moonlight and the moths, and that
unreality of colouring which steals along and stains a summer night.
And he would have given anything to be back in the past--barely three
months back; or away forward, years, in the future. The present with
this stark cruelty of a decision, one way or the other, seemed
impossible. He realised now so much more keenly what his mother felt
than he had at first; as if the story in that letter had been a
poisonous germ producing a kind of fever of partisanship, so that he
really felt there were two camps, his mother's and his--Fleur's and her
father's. It might be a dead thing, that old tragic ownership and
enmity, but dead things were poisonous till Time had cleaned them away.
Even his love felt tainted, less illusioned, more of the earth, and
with a treacherous lurking doubt lest Fleur, like her father, might
want to OWN; not articulate, just a stealing haunt, horribly unworthy,
which crept in and about the ardour of his memories, touched with its
tarnishing breath the vividness and grace of that charmed face and
figure--a doubt, not real enough to convince him of its presence, just
real enough to deflower a perfect faith. And perfect faith, to Jon, not
yet twenty, was essential. He still had Youth's eagerness to give with
both hands, to take with neither--to give lovingly to one who had his
own impulsive generosity. Surely she had! He got up from the
window-seat and roamed in the big grey ghostly room, whose walls were
hung with silvered canvas. This house--his father said in that
death-bed letter--had been built for his mother to live in--with
Fleur's father! He put out his hand in the half-dark, as if to grasp
the shadowy hand of the dead. He clenched, trying to feel the thin
vanished fingers of his father; to squeeze them, and reassure him that
he--he was on his father's side. Tears, prisoned within him, made his
eyes feel dry and hot. He went back to the window. It was warmer, not
so eerie, more comforting outside, where the moon hung golden,