“Very tempting,” said Jon. “I’d like an interest in it. But I’d want to grow fruit and things for a main line.”

“All right, my son; you can grow the apples they eat on Sundays.”

“You see, Jon,” said Holly, “nobody believes in growing anything in England. We talk about it more and more, and do it less and less. Do you see any change in Jon, Val?”

The cousins exchanged a stare.

“A bit more solid; nothing American, anyway.”

Holly murmured thoughtfully: “Why can one always tell an American?”

“Why can one always tell an Englishman?” said Jon.

“Something guarded, my dear. But a national look’s the most difficult thing in the world to define. Still, you can’t mistake the American expression.”

“I don’t believe you’ll take Anne for one.”

“Describe her, Jon.”

“No. Wait till you see her.”

When, after dinner, Val was going his last round of the stables, Jon said:

“Do you ever see Fleur, Holly?”

“I haven’t for eighteen months, I should think. I like her husband; he’s an awfully good sort. You were well out of that, Jon. She isn’t your kind—not that she isn’t charming; but she has to be plumb centre of the stage. I suppose you knew that, really.”

Jon looked at her and did not answer. “Of course,” murmured Holly, “when one’s in love, one doesn’t know much.”

Up in his room again, the house began to be haunted. Into it seemed to troop all his memories, of Fleur, of Robin Hill—old trees of his boyhood, his father’s cigars, his mother’s flowers and music; the nursery of his games, Holly’s nursery before him, with its window looking out over the clock tower above the stables, the room where latterly he had struggled with rhyme. In through his open bedroom window came the sweet-scented air—England’s self—from the loom of the Downs in the moon-scattered dusk, this first night of home for more than two thousand nights. With Robin Hill sold, this was the nearest he had to home in England now.