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.