June, who by nature never saw a hornet's nest until she had put her head
into it, was seriously alarmed. She came and slipped her arm through
his. Not convinced that he was right, and she herself wrong, because
that was not natural to her, she was yet profoundly impressed by the
obvious fact that the subject was very bad for him. She rubbed her cheek
against his shoulder, and said nothing.
After taking her elderly cousin across, Fleur did not land at once, but
pulled in among the reeds, into the sunshine. The peaceful beauty of
the afternoon seduced for a little one not much given to the vague and
poetic. In the field beyond the bank where her skiff lay up, a machine
drawn by a grey horse was turning an early field of hay. She watched the
grass cascading over and behind the light wheels with fascination--it
looked so cool and fresh. The click and swish blended with the rustle of
the willows and the poplars, and the cooing of a wood-pigeon, in a
true river song. Alongside, in the deep green water, weeds, like yellow
snakes, were writhing and nosing with the current; pied cattle on the
farther side stood in the shade lazily swishing their tails. It was
an afternoon to dream. And she took out Jon's letters--not flowery
effusions, but haunted in their recital of things seen and done by a
longing very agreeable to her, and all ending "Your devoted J." Fleur
was not sentimental, her desires were ever concrete and concentrated,
but what poetry there was in the daughter of Soames and Annette had
certainly in those weeks of waiting gathered round her memories of Jon.
They all belonged to grass and blossom, flowers and running water. She
enjoyed him in the scents absorbed by her crinkling nose. The stars
could persuade her that she was standing beside him in the centre of the
map of Spain; and of an early morning the dewy cobwebs, the hazy sparkle
and promise of the day down in the garden, were Jon personified to her.
Two white swans came majestically by, while she was reading his letters,
followed by their brood of six young swans in a line, with just so much
water between each tail and head, a flotilla of grey destroyers. Fleur
thrust her letters back, got out her sculls, and pulled up to the
landing-stage. Crossing the lawn, she wondered whether she should tell
her father of June's visit. If he learned of it from the butler, he
might think it odd if she did not. It gave her, too, another chance to
startle out of him the reason of the feud. She went, therefore, up the
road to meet him.