The Forsyte Saga - Volume 3

He was still so wide awake at dawn that he got up, slipped on tennis

shoes, trousers, and a sweater, and in silence crept downstairs and out

through the study window. It was just light; there was a smell of grass.

'Fleur!' he thought; 'Fleur!' It was mysteriously white out of doors,

with nothing awake except the birds just beginning to chirp. 'I'll go

down into the coppice,' he thought. He ran down through the fields,

reached the pond just as the sun rose, and passed into the coppice.

Bluebells carpeted the ground there; among the larch-trees there was

mystery--the air, as it were, composed of that romantic quality. Jon

sniffed its freshness, and stared at the bluebells in the sharpening

light. Fleur! It rhymed with her! And she lived at Mapleduram--a

jolly name, too, on the river somewhere. He could find it in the atlas

presently. He would write to her. But would she answer? Oh! She must.

She had said "Au revoir!" Not good-bye! What luck that she had dropped

her handkerchief! He would never have known her but for that. And the

more he thought of that handkerchief, the more amazing his luck seemed.

Fleur! It certainly rhymed with her! Rhythm thronged his head; words

jostled to be joined together; he was on the verge of a poem.

Jon remained in this condition for more than half an hour, then returned

to the house, and getting a ladder, climbed in at his bedroom window out

of sheer exhilaration. Then, remembering that the study window was open,

he went down and shut it, first removing the ladder, so as to obliterate

all traces of his feeling. The thing was too deep to be revealed to

mortal soul-even-to his mother.