“Well,” answered the young man, “I've got a father; I kept him

alive during the War, so he's bound to keep me alive now. Though,

of course, there's the question whether he ought to be allowed to

hang on to his property. What do you think about that, sir?”

Soames, pale and defensive, smiled.

“The old man has fits when I tell him he may have to work yet.

He's got land, you know; it's a fatal disease.”

“This is my real Goya,” said Soames dryly.

“By George! He was a swell. I saw a Goya in Munich once that

bowled me middle stump. A most evil-looking old woman in the most

gorgeous lace. He made no compromise with the public taste. That

old boy was 'some' explosive; he must have smashed up a lot of

convention in his day. Couldn't he just paint! He makes Velasquez

stiff, don't you think?”

“I have no Velasquez,” said Soames.

The young man stared. “No,” he said; “only nations or profiteers

can afford him, I suppose. I say, why shouldn't all the bankrupt

nations sell their Velasquez and Titians and other swells to the

profiteers by force, and then pass a law that any one who holds a

picture by an Old Master—see schedule—must hang it in a public

gallery? There seems something in that.”

“Shall we go down to tea?” said Soames.

The young man's ears seemed to droop on his skull. 'He's not

dense,' thought Soames, following him off the premises.

Goya, with his satiric and surpassing precision, his original

“line,” and the daring of his light and shade, could have

reproduced to admiration the group assembled round Annette's

tea-tray in the inglenook below. He alone, perhaps, of painters

would have done justice to the sunlight filtering through a

screen of creeper, to the lovely pallor of brass, the old cut

glasses, the thin slices of lemon in pale amber tea; justice to

Annette in her black lacey dress; there was something of the fair

Spaniard in her beauty, though it lacked the spirituality of that

rare type; to Winifred's grey-haired, corseted solidity; to

Soames, of a certain grey and flat-cheeked distinction; to the

vivacious Michael Mont, pointed in ear and eye; to Imogen, dark,

luscious of glance, growing a little stout; to Prosper Profond,

with his expression as who should say, “Well, Mr. Goya, what's

the use of paintin' this small party?” finally, to Jack Cardigan,

with his shining stare and tanned sanguinity betraying the moving

principle: “I'm English, and I live to be fit.”

Curious, by the way, that Imogen, who as a girl had declared

solemnly one day at Timothy's that she would never marry a good

man—they were so dull—should have married Jack Cardigan, in whom

health had so destroyed all traces of original sin, that she

might have retired to rest with ten thousand other Englishmen

without knowing the difference from the one she had chosen to

repose beside. “Oh!” she would say of him, in her “amusing” way,

“Jack keeps himself so fearfully fit; he's never had a day's

illness in his life. He went right through the War without a

finger-ache. You really can't imagine how fit he is!” Indeed, he

was so “fit” that he couldn't see when she was flirting, which

was such a comfort in a way. All the same she was quite fond of

him, so far as one could be of a sports-machine, and of the two

little Cardigans made after his pattern. Her eyes just then were

comparing him maliciously with Prosper Profond. There was no

“small” sport or game which Monsieur Profond had not played at

too, it seemed, from skittles to tarpon-fishing, and worn out

every one. Imogen would sometimes wish that they had worn out

Jack, who continued to play at them and talk of them with the

simple zeal of a school-girl learning hockey; at the age of

Great-uncle Timothy she well knew that Jack would be playing

carpet golf in her bedroom, and “wiping somebody's eye.”

He was telling them now how he had “pipped the pro—a charmin'

fellow, playin' a very good game,” at the last hole this morning;

and how he had pulled down to Caversham since lunch, and trying

to incite Prosper Profond to play him a set of tennis after

tea—do him good—“keep him fit.

“But what's the use of keepin' fit?” said Monsieur Profond.

“Yes, sir,” murmured Michael Mont, “what do you keep fit for?”

“Jack,” cried Imogen, enchanted, “what do you keep fit for?”

Jack Cardigan stared with all his health. The questions were like

the buzz of a mosquito, and he put up his hand to wipe them away.

During the War, of course, he had kept fit to kill Germans; now

that it was over he either did not know, or shrank in delicacy

from explanation of his moving principle.

“But he's right,” said Monsieur Profond unexpectedly, “there's

nothin' left but keepin' fit.”

The saying, too deep for Sunday afternoon, would have passed

unanswered, but for the mercurial nature of young Mont.

“Good!” he cried. “That's the great discovery of the War. We all

thought we were progressing—now we know we're only changing.”

“For the worse,” said Monsieur Profond genially.

“How you are cheerful, Prosper!” murmured Annette.

“You come and play tennis!” said Jack Cardigan; “you've got the

hump. We'll soon take that down. D'you play, Mr. Mont?”

“I hit the ball about, sir.”

At this juncture Soames rose, ruffled in that deep instinct of

preparation for the future which guided his existence.

“When Fleur comes—” he heard Jack Cardigan say.

Ah! and why didn't she come? He passed through drawing-room,

hall, and porch out on to the drive, and stood there listening

for the car. All was still and Sundayfied; the lilacs in full

flower scented the air. There were white clouds, like the

feathers of ducks gilded by the sunlight. Memory of the day when

Fleur was born, and he had waited in such agony with her life and

her mother's balanced in his hands, came to him sharply. He had

saved her then, to be the flower of his life. And now! was she

going to give him trouble—pain—give him trouble? He did not like

the look of things! A blackbird broke in on his reverie with an

evening song—a great big fellow up in that acacia-tree. Soames

had taken quite an interest in his birds of late years; he and

Fleur would walk round and watch them; her eyes were sharp as

needles, and she knew every nest. He saw her dog, a retriever,

lying on the drive in a patch of sunlight, and called to him.

“Hallo, old fellow-waiting for her too!” The dog came slowly with

a grudging tail, and Soames mechanically laid a pat on his head.

The dog, the bird, the lilac, all were part of Fleur for him; no

more, no less. 'Too fond of her!' he thought, 'too fond!' He was

like a man uninsured, with his ships at sea. Uninsured again—as

in that other time, so long ago, when he would wander dumb and

jealous in the wilderness of London, longing for that woman—his

first wife—the mother of this infernal boy. Ah! There was the car

at last! It drew up, it had luggage, but no Fleur.

“Miss Fleur is walking up, sir, by the towing-path.”

Walking all those miles? Soames stared. The man's face had the

beginning of a smile on it. What was he grinning at? And very

quickly he turned, saying, “All right, Sims!” and went into the

house. He mounted to the picture-gallery once more. He had from

there a view of the river bank, and stood with his eyes fixed on

it, oblivious of the fact that it would be an hour at least

before her figure showed there. Walking up! And that fellow's

grin! The boy—! He turned abruptly from the window. He couldn't

spy on her. If she wanted to keep things from him—she must; he

could not spy on her. His heart felt empty, and bitterness

mounted from it into his very mouth. The staccato shouts of Jack

Cardigan pursuing the ball, the laugh of young Mont rose in the

stillness and came in. He hoped they were making that chap

Profond run. And the girl in “La Vendimia” stood with her arm

akimbo and her dreamy eyes looking past him. 'I've done all I

could for you,' he thought, 'since you were no higher than my

knee. You aren't going to—to—hurt me, are you?'

But the Goya copy answered not, brilliant in colour just

beginning to tone down. 'There's no real life in it,' thought

Soames. 'Why doesn't she come?'

X.—TRIO

Among those four Forsytes of the third, and, as one might say,

fourth generation, at Wansdon under the Downs, a week-end

prolonged unto the ninth day had stretched the crossing threads

of tenacity almost to snapping-point. Never had Fleur been so

“fine,” Holly so watchful, Val so stable-secretive, Jon so silent

and disturbed. What he learned of farming in that week might have

been balanced on the point of a penknife and puffed off. He,

whose nature was essentially averse from intrigue, and whose

adoration of Fleur disposed him to think that any need for

concealing it was “skittles,” chafed and fretted, yet obeyed,

taking what relief he could in the few moments when they were

alone. On Thursday, while they were standing in the bay window of

the drawing-room, dressed for dinner, she said to him:

“Jon, I'm going home on Sunday by the 3.40 from Paddington; if

you were to go home on Saturday you could come up on Sunday and

take me down, and just get back here by the last train, after.

You were going home anyway, weren't you?”

Jon nodded.

“Anything to be with you,” he said; “only why need I pretend—”

Fleur slipped her little finger into his palm:

“You have no instinct, Jon; you must leave things to me. It's

serious about our people. We've simply got to be secret at

present, if we want to be together.” The door was opened, and she

added loudly: “You are a duffer, Jon.”

Something turned over within Jon; he could not bear this

subterfuge about a feeling so natural, so overwhelming, and so

sweet.

On Friday night about eleven he had packed his bag, and was

leaning out of his window, half miserable, and half lost in a

dream of Paddington station, when he heard a tiny sound, as of a

finger-nail tapping on his door. He rushed to it and listened.

Again the sound. It was a nail. He opened. Oh! What a lovely

thing came in!

“I wanted to show you my fancy dress,” it said, and struck an

attitude at the foot of his bed.

Jon drew a long breath and leaned against the door. The

apparition wore white muslin on its head, a fichu round its bare

neck over a wine-coloured dress, fulled out below its slender

waist.

It held one arm akimbo, and the other raised, right-angled,

holding a fan which touched its head.

“This ought to be a basket of grapes,” it whispered, “but I

haven't got it here. It's my Goya dress. And this is the attitude

in the picture. Do you like it?”

“It's a dream.”

The apparition pirouetted. “Touch it, and see.”

Jon knelt down and took the skirt reverently.

“Grape colour,” came the whisper, “all grapes—La Vendimia—the

vintage.”

Jon's fingers scarcely touched each side of the waist; he looked

up, with adoring eyes.

“Oh! Jon,” it whispered; bent, kissed his forehead, pirouetted

again, and, gliding out, was gone.

Jon stayed on his knees, and his head fell forward against the

bed. How long he stayed like that he did not know. The little

noises—of the tapping nail, the feet, the skirts rustling—as in a

dream—went on about him; and before his closed eyes the figure

stood and smiled and whispered, a faint perfume of narcissus

lingering in the air. And his forehead where it had been kissed

had a little cool place between the brows, like the imprint of a

flower. Love filled his soul, that love of boy for girl which

knows so little, hopes so much, would not brush the down off for

the world, and must become in time a fragrant memory—a searing

passion—a humdrum mateship—or, once in many times, vintage full

and sweet with sunset colour on the grapes.

Enough has been said about Jon Forsyte here and in another place

to show what long marches lay between him and his

great-great-grandfather, the first Jolyon, in Dorset down by the

sea. Jon was sensitive as a girl, more sensitive than nine out of

ten girls of the day; imaginative as one of his half-sister

June's “lame duck” painters; affectionate as a son of his father

and his mother naturally would be. And yet, in his inner tissue,

there was something of the old founder of his family, a secret

tenacity of soul, a dread of showing his feelings, a

determination not to know when he was beaten. Sensitive,

imaginative, affectionate boys get a bad time at school, but Jon

had instinctively kept his nature dark, and been but normally

unhappy there. Only with his mother had he, up till then, been

absolutely frank and natural; and when he went home to Robin Hill

that Saturday his heart was heavy because Fleur had said that he

must not be frank and natural with her from whom he had never yet

kept anything, must not even tell her that they had met again,

unless he found that she knew already. So intolerable did this

seem to him that he was very near to telegraphing an excuse and

staying up in London. And the first thing his mother said to him

was:

“So you've had our little friend of the confectioner's there,

Jon. What is she like on second thoughts?”

With relief, and a high colour, Jon answered:

“Oh! awfully jolly, Mum.”

Her arm pressed his.

Jon had never loved her so much as in that minute which seemed to

falsify Fleur's fears and to release his soul. He turned to look

at her, but something in her smiling face—something which only he

perhaps would have caught—stopped the words bubbling up in him.

Could fear go with a smile? If so, there was fear in her face.

And out of Jon tumbled quite other words, about farming, Holly,

and the Downs. Talking fast, he waited for her to come back to

Fleur. But she did not. Nor did his father mention her, though of

course he, too, must know. What deprivation, and killing of

reality was in his silence about Fleur—when he was so full of

her; when his mother was so full of Jon, and his father so full

of his mother! And so the trio spent the evening of that

Saturday.

After dinner his mother played; she seemed to play all the things

he liked best, and he sat with one knee clasped, and his hair

standing up where his fingers had run through it. He gazed at his

mother while she played, but he saw Fleur—Fleur in the moonlit

orchard, Fleur in the sunlit gravel-pit, Fleur in that fancy

dress, swaying, whispering, stooping, kissing his forehead. Once,

while he listened, he forgot himself and glanced at his father in

that other easy chair. What was Dad looking like that for? The

expression on his face was so sad and puzzling. It filled him

with a sort of remorse, so that he got up and went and sat on the

arm of his father's chair. From there he could not see his face;

and again he saw Fleur—in his mother's hands, slim and white on

the keys, in the profile of her face and her powdery hair; and

down the long room in the open window where the May night walked

outside.

When he went up to bed his mother came into his room. She stood

at the window, and said:

“Those cypresses your grandfather planted down there have done

wonderfully. I always think they look beautiful under a dropping

moon. I wish you had known your grandfather, Jon.”

“Were you married to father when he was alive?” asked Jon

suddenly.

“No, dear; he died in '92—very old—eighty-five, I think.”

“Is Father like him?”

“A little, but more subtle, and not quite so solid.”

“I know, from grandfather's portrait; who painted that?”

“One of June's 'lame ducks.' But it's quite good.”

Jon slipped his hand through his mother's arm. “Tell me about the

family quarrel, Mum.”

He felt her arm quivering. “No, dear; that's for your Father some

day, if he thinks fit.”

“Then it was serious,” said Jon, with a catch in his breath.

“Yes.” And there was a silence, during which neither knew whether

the arm or the hand within it were quivering most.

“Some people,” said Irene softly, “think the moon on her back is

evil; to me she's always lovely. Look at those cypress shadows!

Jon, Father says we may go to Italy, you and I, for two months.

Would you like?”

Jon took his hand from under her arm; his sensation was so sharp

and so confused. Italy with his mother! A fortnight ago it would

have been perfection; now it filled him with dismay; he felt that

the sudden suggestion had to do with Fleur. He stammered out:

“Oh! yes; only—I don't know. Ought I—now I've just begun? I'd

like to think it over.”

Her voice answered, cool and gentle:

“Yes, dear; think it over. But better now than when you've begun

farming seriously. Italy with you! It would be nice!”

Jon put his arm round her waist, still slim and firm as a girl's.

“Do you think you ought to leave Father?” he said feebly, feeling

very mean.

“Father suggested it; he thinks you ought to see Italy at least

before you settle down to anything.”

The sense of meanness died in Jon; he knew, yes—he knew—that his

father and his mother were not speaking frankly, no more than he

himself. They wanted to keep him from Fleur. His heart hardened.

And, as if she felt that process going on, his mother said:

“Good-night, darling. Have a good sleep and think it over. But it

would be lovely!”

She pressed him to her so quickly that he did not see her face.

Jon stood feeling exactly as he used to when he was a naughty

little boy; sore because he was not loving, and because he was

justified in his own eyes.

But Irene, after she had stood a moment in her own room, passed

through the dressing-room between it and her husband's.

“Well?”

“He will think it over, Jolyon.”

Watching her lips that wore a little drawn smile, Jolyon said

quietly:

“You had better let me tell him, and have done with it. After

all, Jon has the instincts of a gentleman. He has only to

understand—”

“Only! He can't understand; that's impossible.”

“I believe I could have at his age.”

Irene caught his hand. “You were always more of a realist than

Jon; and never so innocent.”

“That's true,” said Jolyon. “It's queer, isn't it? You and I

would tell our stories to the world without a particle of shame;

but our own boy stumps us.”

“We've never cared whether the world approves or not.”

“Jon would not disapprove of us!”

“Oh! Jolyon, yes. He's in love, I feel he's in love. And he'd

say: 'My mother once married without love! How could she have!'

It'll seem to him a crime! And so it was!”

Jolyon took her hand, and said with a wry smile:

“Ah! why on earth are we born young? Now, if only we were born

old and grew younger year by year, we should understand how

things happen, and drop all our cursed intolerance. But you know

if the boy is really in love, he won't forget, even if he goes to

Italy. We're a tenacious breed; and he'll know by instinct why

he's being sent. Nothing will really cure him but the shock of

being told.”

“Let me try, anyway.”

Jolyon stood a moment without speaking. Between this devil and

this deep sea—the pain of a dreaded disclosure and the grief of

losing his wife for two months—he secretly hoped for the devil;

yet if she wished for the deep sea he must put up with it. After

all, it would be training for that departure from which there

would be no return. And, taking her in his arms, he kissed her

eyes, and said:

“As you will, my love.”

XI.—DUET

That “small” emotion, love, grows amazingly when threatened with

extinction. Jon reached Paddington station half an hour before

his time and a full week after, as it seemed to him. He stood at

the appointed bookstall, amid a crowd of Sunday travellers, in a

Harris tweed suit exhaling, as it were, the emotion of his

thumping heart. He read the names of the novels on the

book-stall, and bought one at last, to avoid being regarded with

suspicion by the book-stall clerk. It was called “The Heart of

the Trail!” which must mean something, though it did not seem to.

He also bought “The Lady's Mirror” and “The Landsman.” Every

minute was an hour long, and full of horrid imaginings. After

nineteen had passed, he saw her with a bag and a porter wheeling

her luggage. She came swiftly; she came cool. She greeted him as

if he were a brother.

“First class,” she said to the porter, “corner seats; opposite.”

Jon admired her frightful self-possession.

“Can't we get a carriage to ourselves,” he whispered.

“No good; it's a stopping train. After Maidenhead perhaps. Look

natural, Jon.”

Jon screwed his features into a scowl. They got in—with two other

beasts!—oh! heaven! He tipped the porter unnaturally, in his

confusion. The brute deserved nothing for putting them in there,

and looking as if he knew all about it into the bargain.

Fleur hid herself behind “The Lady's Mirror.” Jon imitated her

behind “The Landsman.” The train started. Fleur let “The Lady's

Mirror” fall and leaned forward.

“Well?” she said.

“It's seemed about fifteen days.”

She nodded, and Jon's face lighted up at once.

“Look natural,” murmured Fleur, and went off into a bubble of

laughter. It hurt him. How could he look natural with Italy

hanging over him? He had meant to break it to her gently, but now

he blurted it out.

“They want me to go to Italy with Mother for two months.”

Fleur drooped her eyelids; turned a little pale, and bit her

lips. “Oh!” she said. It was all, but it was much.

That “Oh!” was like the quick drawback of the wrist in fencing

ready for riposte. It came.

“You must go!”

“Go?” said Jon in a strangled voice.

“Of course.”

“But—two months—it's ghastly.”

“No,” said Fleur, “six weeks. You'll have forgotten me by then.

We'll meet in the National Gallery the day after you get back.”

Jon laughed.

“But suppose you've forgotten me,” he muttered into the noise of

the train.

Fleur shook her head.

“Some other beast—” murmured Jon.

Her foot touched his.

“No other beast,” she said, lifting “The Lady's Mirror.”

The train stopped; two passengers got out, and one got in.

'I shall die,' thought Jon, 'if we're not alone at all.'

The train went on; and again Fleur leaned forward.

“I never let go,” she said; “do you?”

Jon shook his head vehemently.

“Never!” he said. “Will you write to me?”

“No; but you can—to my Club.”

She had a Club; she was wonderful!

“Did you pump Holly?” he muttered.

“Yes, but I got nothing. I didn't dare pump hard.”

“What can it be?” cried Jon.

“I shall find out all right.”

A long silence followed till Fleur said: “This is Maidenhead;

stand by, Jon!”

The train stopped. The remaining passenger got out. Fleur drew

down her blind.

“Quick!” she cried. “Hang out! Look as much of a beast as you

can.”

Jon blew his nose, and scowled; never in all his life had he

scowled like that! An old lady recoiled, a young one tried the

handle. It turned, but the door would not open. The train moved,

the young lady darted to another carriage.

“What luck!” cried Jon. “It Jammed.”

“Yes,” said Fleur; “I was holding it.”

The train moved out, and Jon fell on his knees.

“Look out for the corridor,” she whispered; “and—quick!”

Her lips met his. And though their kiss only lasted perhaps ten

seconds, Jon's soul left his body and went so far beyond, that,

when he was again sitting opposite that demure figure, he was

pale as death. He heard her sigh, and the sound seemed to him the

most precious he had ever heard—an exquisite declaration that he

meant something to her.

“Six weeks isn't really long,” she said; “and you can easily make

it six if you keep your head out there, and never seem to think

of me.”

Jon gasped.

“This is just what's really wanted, Jon, to convince them, don't

you see? If we're just as bad when you come back they'll stop

being ridiculous about it. Only, I'm sorry it's not Spain;

there's a girl in a Goya picture at Madrid who's like me, Father

says. Only she isn't—we've got a copy of her.”

It was to Jon like a ray of sunshine piercing through a fog.

“I'll make it Spain,” he said, “Mother won't mind; she's never

been there. And my Father thinks a lot of Goya.”

“Oh! yes, he's a painter—isn't he?”

“Only water-colour,” said Jon, with honesty.

“When we come to Reading, Jon, get out first and go down to

Caversham lock and wait for me. I'll send the car home and we'll

walk by the towing-path.”

Jon seized her hand in gratitude, and they sat silent, with the

world well lost, and one eye on the corridor. But the train

seemed to run twice as fast now, and its sound was almost lost in

that of Jon's sighing.

“We're getting near,” said Fleur; “the towing-path's awfully

exposed. One more! Oh! Jon, don't forget me.”

Jon answered with his kiss. And very soon, a flushed,

distracted-looking youth could have been seen—as they say—leaping

from the train and hurrying along the platform, searching his

pockets for his ticket.

When at last she rejoined him on the towing-path a little beyond

Caversham lock he had made an effort, and regained some measure

of equanimity. If they had to part, he would not make a scene! A

breeze by the bright river threw the white side of the willow

leaves up into the sunlight, and followed those two with its

faint rustle.

“I told our chauffeur that I was train-giddy,” said Fleur. “Did

you look pretty natural as you went out?”

“I don't know. What is natural?”

“It's natural to you to look seriously happy. When I first saw

you I thought you weren't a bit like other people.”

“Exactly what I thought when I saw you. I knew at once I should

never love anybody else.”

Fleur laughed.

“We're absurdly young. And love's young dream is out of date,

Jon. Besides, it's awfully wasteful. Think of all the fun you

might have. You haven't begun, even; it's a shame, really. And

there's me. I wonder!”

Confusion came on Jon's spirit. How could she say such things

just as they were going to part?

“If you feel like that,” he said, “I can't go. I shall tell

Mother that I ought to try and work. There's always the condition

of the world!”

“The condition of the world!”

Jon thrust his hands deep into his pockets.

“But there is,” he said; “think of the people starving!”

Fleur shook her head. “No, no, I never, never will make myself

miserable for nothing.”

“Nothing! But there's an awful state of things, and of course one

ought to help.”

“Oh! yes, I know all that. But you can't help people, Jon;

they're hopeless. When you pull them out they only get into

another hole. Look at them, still fighting and plotting and

struggling, though they're dying in heaps all the time. Idiots!”

“Aren't you sorry for them?”

“Oh! sorry—yes, but I'm not going to make myself unhappy about

it; that's no good.”

And they were silent, disturbed by this first glimpse of each

other's natures.

“I think people are brutes and idiots,” said Fleur stubbornly.

“I think they're poor wretches,” said Jon. It was as if they had

quarrelled—and at this supreme and awful moment, with parting

visible out there in that last gap of the willows!

“Well, go and help your poor wretches, and don't think of me.”

Jon stood still. Sweat broke out on his forehead, and his limbs

trembled. Fleur too had stopped, and was frowning at the river.

“I must believe in things,” said Jon with a sort of agony; “we're

all meant to enjoy life.”

Fleur laughed. “Yes; and that's what you won't do, if you don't

take care. But perhaps your idea of enjoyment is to make yourself

wretched. There are lots of people like that, of course.”

She was pale, her eyes had darkened, her lips had thinned. Was it

Fleur thus staring at the water? Jon had an unreal feeling as if

he were passing through the scene in a book where the lover has

to choose between love and duty. But just then she looked round

at him. Never was anything so intoxicating as that vivacious

look. It acted on him exactly as the tug of a chain acts on a

dog—brought him up to her with his tail wagging and his tongue

out.

“Don't let's be silly,” she said, “time's too short. Look, Jon,

you can just see where I've got to cross the river. There, round

the bend, where the woods begin.”

Jon saw a gable, a chimney or two, a patch of wall through the

trees—and felt his heart sink.

“I mustn't dawdle any more. It's no good going beyond the next

hedge, it gets all open. Let's get on to it and say good-bye.”

They went side by side, hand in hand, silently toward the hedge,

where the may-flower, both pink and white, was in full bloom.

“My Club's the 'Talisman,' Stratton Street, Piccadilly. Letters

there will be quite safe, and I'm almost always up once a week.”

Jon nodded. His face had become extremely set, his eyes stared

straight before him.

“To-day's the twenty-third of May,” said Fleur; “on the ninth of

July I shall be in front of the 'Bacchus and Ariadne' at three

o'clock; will you?”

“I will.”

“If you feel as bad as I it's all right. Let those people pass!”

A man and woman airing their children went by strung out in

Sunday fashion.

The last of them passed the wicket gate.

“Domesticity!” said Fleur, and blotted herself against the

hawthorn hedge. The blossom sprayed out above her head, and one

pink cluster brushed her cheek. Jon put up his hand jealously to

keep it off.

“Good-bye, Jon.” For a second they stood with hands hard clasped.

Then their lips met for the third time, and when they parted

Fleur broke away and fled through the wicket gate. Jon stood

where she had left him, with his forehead against that pink

cluster. Gone! For an eternity—for seven weeks all but two days!

And here he was, wasting the last sight of her! He rushed to the

gate. She was walking swiftly on the heels of the straggling

children. She turned her head, he saw her hand make a little

flitting gesture; then she sped on, and the trailing family

blotted her out from his view.

The words of a comic song—

“Paddington groan-worst ever known He gave a sepulchral

Paddington groan—”

came into his head, and he sped incontinently back to Reading

station. All the way up to London and down to Wansdon he sat with

“The Heart of the Trail” open on his knee, knitting in his head a

poem so full of feeling that it would not rhyme.

XII.—CAPRICE

Fleur sped on. She had need of rapid motion; she was late, and

wanted all her wits about her when she got in. She passed the

islands, the station, and hotel, and was about to take the ferry,

when she saw a skiff with a young man standing up in it, and

holding to the bushes.

“Miss Forsyte,” he said; “let me put you across. I've come on

purpose.”

She looked at him in blank amazement.

“It's all right, I've been having tea with your people. I thought

I'd save you the last bit. It's on my way, I'm just off back to

Pangbourne. My name's Mont. I saw you at the picture-gallery—you

remember—when your father invited me to see his pictures.”

“Oh!” said Fleur; “yes—the handkerchief.”

To this young man she owed Jon; and, taking his hand, she stepped

down into the skiff. Still emotional, and a little out of breath,

she sat silent; not so the young man. She had never heard any one

say so much in so short a time. He told her his age, twenty-four;

his weight, ten stone eleven; his place of residence, not far

away; described his sensations under fire, and what it felt like

to be gassed; criticized the Juno, mentioned his own conception

of that goddess; commented on the Goya copy, said Fleur was not

too awfully like it; sketched in rapidly the condition of

England; spoke of Monsieur Profond—or whatever his name was—as

“an awful sport”; thought her father had some “ripping” pictures

and some rather “dug-up”; hoped he might row down again and take

her on the river because he was quite trustworthy; inquired her

opinion of Tchekov, gave her his own; wished they could go to the

Russian ballet together some time—considered the name Fleur

Forsyte simply topping; cursed his people for giving him the name

of Michael on the top of Mont; outlined his father, and said that

if she wanted a good book she should read “Job”; his father was

rather like Job while Job still had land.

“But Job didn't have land,” Fleur murmured; “he only had flocks

and herds and moved on.”

“Ah!” answered Michael Mont, “I wish my gov'nor would move on.

Not that I want his land. Land's an awful bore in these days,

don't you think?”

“We never have it in my family,” said Fleur. “We have everything

else. I believe one of my great-uncles once had a sentimental

farm in Dorset, because we came from there originally, but it

cost him more than it made him happy.”

“Did he sell it?”

“No; he kept it.”

“Why?”

“Because nobody would buy it.”

“Good for the old boy!”

“No, it wasn't good for him. Father says it soured him. His name

was Swithin.”

“What a corking name!”

“Do you know that we're getting farther off, not nearer? This

river flows.”

“Splendid!” cried Mont, dipping his sculls vaguely; “it's good to

meet a girl who's got wit.”

“But better to meet a young man who's got it in the plural.”

Young Mont raised a hand to tear his hair.

“Look out!” cried Fleur. “Your scull!”

“All right! It's thick enough to bear a scratch.”

“Do you mind sculling?” said Fleur severely. “I want to get in.”

“Ah!” said Mont; “but when you get in, you see, I shan't see you

any more to-day. Fini, as the French girl said when she jumped on

her bed after saying her prayers. Don't you bless the day that

gave you a French mother, and a name like yours?”

“I like my name, but Father gave it me. Mother wanted me called

Marguerite.”

“Which is absurd. Do you mind calling me M. M. and letting me

call you F. F.? It's in the spirit of the age.”

“I don't mind anything, so long as I get in.”

Mont caught a little crab, and answered: “That was a nasty one!”

“Please row.”

“I am.” And he did for several strokes, looking at her with

rueful eagerness. “Of course, you know,” he ejaculated, pausing,

“that I came to see you, not your father's pictures.”

Fleur rose.

“If you don't row, I shall get out and swim.”

“Really and truly? Then I could come in after you.”

“Mr. Mont, I'm late and tired; please put me on shore at once.”

When she stepped out on to the garden landing-stage he rose, and

grasping his hair with both hands, looked at her.

Fleur smiled.

“Don't!” cried the irrepressible Mont. “I know you're going to

say: 'Out, damned hair!'”

Fleur whisked round, threw him a wave of her hand. “Good-bye, Mr.

M.M.!” she called, and was gone among the rose-trees. She looked

at her wrist-watch and the windows of the house. It struck her as

curiously uninhabited. Past six! The pigeons were just gathering

to roost, and sunlight slanted on the dovecot, on their snowy

feathers, and beyond in a shower on the top boughs of the woods.

The click of billiard-balls came from the ingle-nook—Jack

Cardigan, no doubt; a faint rustling, too, from an

eucalyptus-tree, startling Southerner in this old English garden.

She reached the verandah and was passing in, but stopped at the

sound of voices from the drawing-room to her left. Mother!

Monsieur Profond! From behind the verandah screen which fenced

the ingle-nook she heard these words:

“I don't, Annette.”

Did Father know that he called her mother “Annette”? Always on

the side of her Father—as children are ever on one side or the

other in houses where relations are a little strained—she stood,

uncertain. Her mother was speaking in her low, pleasing, slightly

metallic voice—one word she caught: “Demain.” And Profond's

answer: “All right.” Fleur frowned. A little sound came out into

the stillness. Then Profond's voice: “I'm takin' a small stroll.”

Fleur darted through the window into the morning-room. There he

came from the drawing-room, crossing the verandah, down the lawn;

and the click of billiard-balls which, in listening for other

sounds, she had ceased to hear, began again. She shook herself,

passed into the hall, and opened the drawing-room door. Her

mother was sitting on the sofa between the windows, her knees

crossed, her head resting on a cushion, her lips half parted, her

eyes half closed. She looked extraordinarily handsome.

“Ah! Here you are, Fleur! Your father is beginning to fuss.”

“Where is he?”

“In the picture-gallery. Go up!”

“What are you going to do to-morrow, Mother?”

“To-morrow? I go up to London with your aunt.”

“I thought you might be. Will you get me a quite plain parasol?”

“What colour?”

“Green. They're all going back, I suppose.”

“Yes, all; you will console your father. Kiss me, then.”

Fleur crossed the room, stooped, received a kiss on her forehead,

and went out past the impress of a form on the sofa-cushions in

the other corner. She ran up-stairs.

Fleur was by no means the old-fashioned daughter who demands the

regulation of her parents' lives in accordance with the standard

imposed upon herself. She claimed to regulate her own life, not

those of others; besides, an unerring instinct for what was

likely to advantage her own case was already at work. In a

disturbed domestic atmosphere the heart she had set on Jon would

have a better chance. None the less was she offended, as a flower

by a crisping wind. If that man had really been kissing her

mother it was—serious, and her father ought to know. “Demain!”

“All right!” And her mother going up to Town! She turned into her

bedroom and hung out of the window to cool her face, which had

suddenly grown very hot. Jon must be at the station by now! What

did her father know about Jon? Probably everything—pretty nearly!

She changed her dress, so as to look as if she had been in some

time, and ran up to the gallery.

Soames was standing stubbornly still before his Alfred

Stevens—the picture he loved best. He did not turn at the sound

of the door, but she knew he had heard, and she knew he was hurt.

She came up softly behind him, put her arms round his neck, and

poked her face over his shoulder till her cheek lay against his.

It was an advance which had never yet failed, but it failed her

now, and she augured the worst. “Well,” he said stonily, “so

you've come!”

“Is that all,” murmured Fleur, “from a bad parent?” And she

rubbed her cheek against his.

Soames shook his head so far as that was possible.

“Why do you keep me on tenterhooks like this, putting me off and

off?”

“Darling, it was very harmless.”

“Harmless! Much you know what's harmless and what isn't.”

Fleur dropped her arms.

“Well, then, dear, suppose you tell me; and be quite frank about

it.”

And she went over to the window-seat.

Her father had turned from his picture, and was staring at his

feet. He looked very grey. 'He has nice small feet,' she thought,

catching his eye, at once averted from her.

“You're my only comfort,” said Soames suddenly, “and you go on

like this.”

Fleur's heart began to beat.

“Like what, dear?”

Again Soames gave her a look which, but for the affection in it,

might have been called furtive.

“You know what I told you,” he said. “I don't choose to have

anything to do with that branch of our family.”

“Yes, ducky, but I don't know why I shouldn't.”

Soames turned on his heel.

“I'm not going into the reasons,” he said; “you ought to trust

me, Fleur!”

The way he spoke those words affected Fleur, but she thought of

Jon, and was silent, tapping her foot against the wainscot.

Unconsciously she had assumed a modern attitude, with one leg

twisted in and out of the other, with her chin on one bent wrist,

her other arm across her chest, and its hand hugging her elbow;

there was not a line of her that was not involuted, and yet—in

spite of all—she retained a certain grace.

“You knew my wishes,” Soames went on, “and yet you stayed on

there four days. And I suppose that boy came with you to-day.”

Fleur kept her eyes on him.

“I don't ask you anything,” said Soames; “I make no inquisition

where you're concerned.”

Fleur suddenly stood up, leaning out at the window with her chin

on her hands. The sun had sunk behind trees, the pigeons were

perched, quite still, on the edge of the dove-cot; the click of

the billiard-balls mounted, and a faint radiance shone out below

where Jack Cardigan had turned the light up.

“Will it make you any happier,” she said suddenly, “if I promise

you not to see him for say—the next six weeks?” She was not

prepared for a sort of tremble in the blankness of his voice.

“Six weeks? Six years—sixty years more like. Don't delude

yourself, Fleur; don't delude yourself!”

Fleur turned in alarm.

“Father, what is it?”

Soames came close enough to see her face.

“Don't tell me,” he said, “that you're foolish enough to have any

feeling beyond caprice. That would be too much!” And he laughed.

Fleur, who had never heard him laugh like that, thought: 'Then it

is deep! Oh! what is it?' And putting her hand through his arm

she said lightly:

“No, of course; caprice. Only, I like my caprices and I don't

like yours, dear.”

“Mine!” said Soames bitterly, and turned away.

The light outside had chilled, and threw a chalky whiteness on

the river. The trees had lost all gaiety of colour. She felt a

sudden hunger for Jon's face, for his hands, and the feel of his

lips again on hers. And pressing her arms tight across her breast

she forced out a little light laugh.

“O la! la! What a small fuss! as Profond would say. Father, I

don't like that man.”

She saw him stop, and take something out of his breast pocket.

“You don't?” he said. “Why?”

“Nothing,” murmured Fleur; “just caprice!”

“No,” said Soames; “not caprice!” And he tore what was in his

hands across. “You're right. I don't like him either!”

“Look!” said Fleur softly. “There he goes! I hate his shoes; they

don't make any noise.”

Down in the failing light Prosper Profond moved, his hands in his

side pockets, whistling softly in his beard; he stopped, and

glanced up at the sky, as if saying: “I don't think much of that

small moon.”

Fleur drew back. “Isn't he a great cat?” she whispered; and the

sharp click of the billiard-balls rose, as if Jack Cardigan had

capped the cat, the moon, caprice, and tragedy with: “In off the

red!”

Monsieur Profond had resumed his stroll, to a teasing little tune

in his beard. What was it? Oh! yes, from “Rigoletto”: “Donna a

mobile.” Just what he would think! She squeezed her father's arm.

“Prowling!” she muttered, as he turned the corner of the house.

It was past that disillusioned moment which divides the day and

night-still and lingering and warm, with hawthorn scent and lilac

scent clinging on the riverside air. A blackbird suddenly burst

out. Jon would be in London by now; in the Park perhaps, crossing

the Serpentine, thinking of her! A little sound beside her made

her turn her eyes; her father was again tearing the paper in his

hands. Fleur saw it was a cheque.

“I shan't sell him my Gauguin,” he said. “I don't know what your

aunt and Imogen see in him.”

“Or Mother.”

“Your mother!” said Soames.

'Poor Father!' she thought. 'He never looks happy—not really

happy. I don't want to make him worse, but of course I shall have

to, when Jon comes back. Oh! well, sufficient unto the night!'

“I'm going to dress,” she said.

In her room she had a fancy to put on her “freak” dress. It was

of gold tissue with little trousers of the same, tightly drawn in

at the ankles, a page's cape slung from the shoulders, little

gold shoes, and a gold-winged Mercury helmet; and all over her

were tiny gold bells, especially on the helmet; so that if she

shook her head she pealed. When she was dressed she felt quite

sick because Jon could not see her; it even seemed a pity that

the sprightly young man Michael Mont would not have a view. But

the gong had sounded, and she went down.

She made a sensation in the drawing-room. Winifred thought it

“Most amusing.” Imogen was enraptured. Jack Cardigan called it

“stunning,” “ripping,” “topping,” and “corking.”

Monsieur Profond, smiling with his eyes, said: “That's a nice

small dress!” Her mother, very handsome in black, sat looking at

her, and said nothing. It remained for her father to apply the

test of common sense. “What did you put on that thing for? You're

not going to dance.”

Fleur spun round, and the bells pealed.

“Caprice!”

Soames stared at her, and, turning away, gave his arm to

Winifred. Jack Cardigan took her mother. Prosper Profond took

Imogen. Fleur went in by herself, with her bells jingling....

The “small” moon had soon dropped down, and May night had fallen

soft and warm, enwrapping with its grape-bloom colour and its

scents the billion caprices, intrigues, passions, longings, and

regrets of men and women. Happy was Jack Cardigan who snored into

Imogen's white shoulder, fit as a flea; or Timothy in his

“mausoleum,” too old for anything but baby's slumber. For so many

lay awake, or dreamed, teased by the criss-cross of the world.

The dew fell and the flowers closed; cattle grazed on in the

river meadows, feeling with their tongues for the grass they

could not see; and the sheep on the Downs lay quiet as stones.

Pheasants in the tall trees of the Pangbourne woods, larks on

their grassy nests above the gravel-pit at Wansdon, swallows in

the eaves at Robin Hill, and the sparrows of Mayfair, all made a

dreamless night of it, soothed by the lack of wind. The Mayfly

filly, hardly accustomed to her new quarters, scraped at her

straw a little; and the few night-flitting things—bats, moths,

owls—were vigorous in the warm darkness; but the peace of night

lay in the brain of all day-time Nature, colourless and still.

Men and women, alone, riding the hobby-horses of anxiety or love,

burned their wavering tapers of dream and thought into the lonely

hours.

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.

PART II

I.—MOTHER AND SON

To say that Jon Forsyte accompanied his mother to Spain

unwillingly would scarcely have been adequate. He went as a

well-natured dog goes for a walk with its mistress, leaving a

choice mutton-bone on the lawn. He went looking back at it.

Forsytes deprived of their mutton-bones are wont to sulk. But Jon

had little sulkiness in his composition. He adored his mother,

and it was his first travel. Spain had become Italy by his simply

saying: “I'd rather go to Spain, Mum; you've been to Italy so

many times; I'd like it new to both of us.”

The fellow was subtle besides being naive. He never forgot that

he was going to shorten the proposed two months into six weeks,

and must therefore show no sign of wishing to do so. For one with

so enticing a mutton-bone and so fixed an idea, he made a good

enough travelling companion, indifferent to where or when he

arrived, superior to food, and thoroughly appreciative of a

country strange to the most travelled Englishman. Fleur's wisdom

in refusing to write to him was profound, for he reached each new

place entirely without hope or fever, and could concentrate

immediate attention on the donkeys and tumbling bells, the

priests, patios, beggars, children, crowing cocks, sombreros,

cactus-hedges, old high white villages, goats, olive-trees,

greening plains, singing birds in tiny cages, watersellers,

sunsets, melons, mules, great churches, pictures, and swimming

grey-brown mountains of a fascinating land.

It was already hot, and they enjoyed an absence of their

compatriots. Jon, who, so far as he knew, had no blood in him

which was not English, was often innately unhappy in the presence

of his own countrymen. He felt they had no nonsense about them,

and took a more practical view of things than himself. He

confided to his mother that he must be an unsociable beast—it was

jolly to be away from everybody who could talk about the things

people did talk about. To which Irene had replied simply:

“Yes, Jon, I know.”

In this isolation he had unparalleled opportunities of

appreciating what few sons can apprehend, the whole-heartedness

of a mother's love. Knowledge of something kept from her made

him, no doubt, unduly sensitive; and a Southern people stimulated

his admiration for her type of beauty, which he had been

accustomed to hear called Spanish, but which he now perceived to

be no such thing. Her beauty was neither English, French,

Spanish, nor Italian—it was special! He appreciated, too, as

never before, his mother's subtlety of instinct. He could not

tell, for instance, whether she had noticed his absorption in

that Goya picture, “La Vendimia,” or whether she knew that he had

slipped back there after lunch and again next morning, to stand

before it full half an hour, a second and third time. It was not

Fleur, of course, but like enough to give him heartache—so dear

to lovers—remembering her standing at the foot of his bed with

her hand held above her head. To keep a postcard reproduction of

this picture in his pocket and slip it out to look at became for

Jon one of those bad habits which soon or late disclose

themselves to eyes sharpened by love, fear, or jealousy. And his

mother's were sharpened by all three. In Granada he was fairly

caught, sitting on a sun-warmed stone bench in a little

battlemented garden on the Alhambra hill, whence he ought to have

been looking at the view. His mother, he had thought, was

examining the potted stocks between the polled acacias, when her

voice said:

“Is that your favourite Goya, Jon?”

He checked, too late, a movement such as he might have made at

school to conceal some surreptitious document, and answered:

“Yes.”

“It certainly is most charming; but I think I prefer the

'Quitasol' Your father would go crazy about Goya; I don't believe

he saw them when he was in Spain in '92.”

In '92—nine years before he had been born! What had been the

previous existences of his father and his mother? If they had a

right to share in his future, surely he had a right to share in

their pasts. He looked up at her. But something in her face—a

look of life hard-lived, the mysterious impress of emotions,

experience, and suffering-seemed, with its incalculable depth,

its purchased sanctity, to make curiosity impertinent. His mother

must have had a wonderfully interesting life; she was so

beautiful, and so—so—but he could not frame what he felt about

her. He got up, and stood gazing down at the town, at the plain

all green with crops, and the ring of mountains glamorous in

sinking sunlight. Her life was like the past of this old Moorish

city, full, deep, remote—his own life as yet such a baby of a

thing, hopelessly ignorant and innocent! They said that in those

mountains to the West, which rose sheer from the blue-green

plain, as if out of a sea, Phoenicians had dwelt—a dark, strange,

secret race, above the land! His mother's life was as unknown to

him, as secret, as that Phoenician past was to the town down

there, whose cocks crowed and whose children played and clamoured

so gaily, day in, day out. He felt aggrieved that she should know

all about him and he nothing about her except that she loved him

and his father, and was beautiful. His callow ignorance—he had

not even had the advantage of the War, like nearly everybody

else!—made him small in his own eyes.

That night, from the balcony of his bedroom, he gazed down on the

roof of the town—as if inlaid with honeycomb of jet, ivory, and

gold; and, long after, he lay awake, listening to the cry of the

sentry as the hours struck, and forming in his head these lines:

“Voice in the night crying, down in the old sleeping Spanish city

darkened under her white stars!

“What says the voice-its clear-lingering anguish? Just the

watchman, telling his dateless tale of safety? Just a road-man,

flinging to the moon his song?

“No! Tis one deprived, whose lover's heart is weeping, Just his

cry: 'How long?'”

The word “deprived” seemed to him cold and unsatisfactory, but

“bereaved” was too final, and no other word of two syllables

short-long came to him, which would enable him to keep “whose

lover's heart is weeping.” It was past two by the time he had

finished it, and past three before he went to sleep, having said

it over to himself at least twenty-four times. Next day he wrote

it out and enclosed it in one of those letters to Fleur which he

always finished before he went down, so as to have his mind free

and companionable.

About noon that same day, on the tiled terrace of their hotel, he

felt a sudden dull pain in the back of his head, a queer

sensation in the eyes, and sickness. The sun had touched him too

affectionately. The next three days were passed in semi-darkness,

and a dulled, aching indifference to all except the feel of ice

on his forehead and his mother's smile. She never moved from his

room, never relaxed her noiseless vigilance, which seemed to Jon

angelic. But there were moments when he was extremely sorry for

himself, and wished terribly that Fleur could see him. Several

times he took a poignant imaginary leave of her and of the earth,

tears oozing out of his eyes. He even prepared the message he

would send to her by his mother—who would regret to her dying day

that she had ever sought to separate them—his poor mother! He was

not slow, however, in perceiving that he had now his excuse for

going home.

Toward half-past six each evening came a “gasgacha” of bells—a

cascade of tumbling chimes, mounting from the city below and

falling back chime on chime. After listening to them on the

fourth day he said suddenly:

“I'd like to be back in England, Mum, the sun's too hot.”

“Very well, darling. As soon as you're fit to travel” And at once

he felt better, and—meaner.

They had been out five weeks when they turned toward home. Jon's

head was restored to its pristine clarity, but he was confined to

a hat lined by his mother with many layers of orange and green

silk and he still walked from choice in the shade. As the long

struggle of discretion between them drew to its close, he

wondered more and more whether she could see his eagerness to get

back to that which she had brought him away from. Condemned by

Spanish Providence to spend a day in Madrid between their trains,

it was but natural to go again to the Prado. Jon was elaborately

casual this time before his Goya girl. Now that he was going back

to her, he could afford a lesser scrutiny. It was his mother who

lingered before the picture, saying:

“The face and the figure of the girl are exquisite.”

Jon heard her uneasily. Did she understand? But he felt once more

that he was no match for her in self-control and subtlety. She

could, in some supersensitive way, of which he had not the

secret, feel the pulse of his thoughts; she knew by instinct what

he hoped and feared and wished. It made him terribly

uncomfortable and guilty, having, beyond most boys, a conscience.

He wished she would be frank with him, he almost hoped for an

open struggle. But none came, and steadily, silently, they

travelled north. Thus did he first learn how much better than men

women play a waiting game. In Paris they had again to pause for a

day. Jon was grieved because it lasted two, owing to certain

matters in connection with a dressmaker; as if his mother, who

looked beautiful in anything, had any need of dresses! The

happiest moment of his travel was that when he stepped on to the

Folkestone boat.

Standing by the bulwark rail, with her arm in his, she said

“I'm afraid you haven't enjoyed it much, Jon. But you've been

very sweet to me.”

Jon squeezed her arm.

“Oh! yes, I've enjoyed it awfully-except for my head lately.”

And now that the end had come, he really had, feeling a sort of

glamour over the past weeks—a kind of painful pleasure, such as

he had tried to screw into those lines about the voice in the

night crying; a feeling such as he had known as a small boy

listening avidly to Chopin, yet wanting to cry. And he wondered

why it was that he couldn't say to her quite simply what she had

said to him:

“You were very sweet to me.” Odd—one never could be nice and

natural like that! He substituted the words: “I expect we shall

be sick.”

They were, and reached London somewhat attenuated, having been

away six weeks and two days, without a single allusion to the

subject which had hardly ever ceased to occupy their minds.

II.—FATHERS AND DAUGHTERS

Deprived of his wife and son by the Spanish adventure, Jolyon

found the solitude at Robin Hill intolerable. A philosopher when

he has all that he wants is different from a philosopher when he

has not. Accustomed, however, to the idea, if not to the reality

of resignation, he would perhaps have faced it out but for his

daughter June. He was a “lame duck” now, and on her conscience.

Having achieved—momentarily—the rescue of an etcher in low

circumstances, which she happened to have in hand, she appeared

at Robin Hill a fortnight after Irene and Jon had gone. June was

living now in a tiny house with a big studio at Chiswick. A

Forsyte of the best period, so far as the lack of responsibility

was concerned, she had overcome the difficulty of a reduced

income in a manner satisfactory to herself and her father. The

rent of the Gallery off Cork Street which he had bought for her

and her increased income tax happening to balance, it had been

quite simple—she no longer paid him the rent. The Gallery might

be expected now at any time, after eighteen years of barren

usufruct, to pay its way, so that she was sure her father would

not feel it. Through this device she still had twelve hundred a

year, and by reducing what she ate, and, in place of two Belgians

in a poor way, employing one Austrian in a poorer, practically

the same surplus for the relief of genius. After three days at

Robin Hill she carried her father back with her to Town. In those

three days she had stumbled on the secret he had kept for two

years, and had instantly decided to cure him. She knew, in fact,

the very man. He had done wonders with. Paul Post—that painter a

little in advance of Futurism; and she was impatient with her

father because his eyebrows would go up, and because he had heard

of neither. Of course, if he hadn't “faith” he would never get

well! It was absurd not to have faith in the man who had healed

Paul Post so that he had only just relapsed, from having

overworked, or overlived, himself again. The great thing about

this healer was that he relied on Nature. He had made a special

study of the symptoms of Nature—when his patient failed in any

natural symptom he supplied the poison which caused it—and there

you were! She was extremely hopeful. Her father had clearly not

been living a natural life at Robin Hill, and she intended to

provide the symptoms. He was—she felt—out of touch with the

times, which was not natural; his heart wanted stimulating. In

the little Chiswick house she and the Austrian—a grateful soul,

so devoted to June for rescuing her that she was in danger of

decease from overwork—stimulated Jolyon in all sorts of ways,

preparing him for his cure. But they could not keep his eyebrows

down; as, for example, when the Austrian woke him at eight

o'clock just as he was going to sleep, or June took The Times

away from him, because it was unnatural to read “that stuff” when

he ought to be taking an interest in “life.” He never failed,

indeed, to be astonished at her resource, especially in the

evenings. For his benefit, as she declared, though he suspected

that she also got something out of it, she assembled the Age so

far as it was satellite to genius; and with some solemnity it

would move up and down the studio before him in the Fox-trot, and

that more mental form of dancing—the One-step—which so pulled

against the music, that Jolyon's eyebrows would be almost lost in

his hair from wonder at the strain it must impose on the dancer's

will-power. Aware that, hung on the line in the Water Colour

Society, he was a back number to those with any pretension to be

called artists, he would sit in the darkest corner he could find,

and wonder about rhythm, on which so long ago he had been raised.

And when June brought some girl or young man up to him, he would

rise humbly to their level so far as that was possible, and

think: 'Dear me! This is very dull for them!' Having his father's

perennial sympathy with Youth, he used to get very tired from

entering into their points of view. But it was all stimulating,

and he never failed in admiration of his daughter's indomitable

spirit. Even genius itself attended these gatherings now and

then, with its nose on one side; and June always introduced it to

her father. This, she felt, was exceptionally good for him, for

genius was a natural symptom he had never had—fond as she was of

him.

Certain as a man can be that she was his own daughter, he often

wondered whence she got herself—her red-gold hair, now greyed

into a special colour; her direct, spirited face, so different

from his own rather folded and subtilised countenance, her little

lithe figure, when he and most of the Forsytes were tall. And he

would dwell on the origin of species, and debate whether she

might be Danish or Celtic. Celtic, he thought, from her

pugnacity, and her taste in fillets and djibbahs. It was not too

much to say that he preferred her to the Age with which she was

surrounded, youthful though, for the greater part, it was. She

took, however, too much interest in his teeth, for he still had

some of those natural symptoms. Her dentist at once found

“Staphylococcus aureus present in pure culture” (which might

cause boils, of course), and wanted to take out all the teeth he

had and supply him with two complete sets of unnatural symptoms.

Jolyon's native tenacity was roused, and in the studio that

evening he developed his objections. He had never had any boils,

and his own teeth would last his time. Of course—June

admitted—they would last his time if he didn't have them out! But

if he had more teeth he would have a better heart and his time

would be longer. His recalcitrance—she said—was a symptom of his

whole attitude; he was taking it lying down. He ought to be

fighting. When was he going to see the man who had cured Paul

Post? Jolyon was very sorry, but the fact was he was not going to

see him. June chafed. Pondridge—she said—the healer, was such a

fine man, and he had such difficulty in making two ends meet, and

getting his theories recognised. It was just such indifference

and prejudice as her father manifested which was keeping him

back. It would be so splendid for both of them!

“I perceive,” said Jolyon, “that you are trying to kill two birds

with one stone.”

“To cure, you mean!” cried June.

“My dear, it's the same thing.”

June protested. It was unfair to say that without a trial.

Jolyon thought he might not have the chance, of saying it after.

“Dad!” cried June, “you're hopeless.”

“That,” said Jolyon, “is a fact, but I wish to remain hopeless as

long as possible. I shall let sleeping dogs lie, my child. They

are quiet at present.”

“That's not giving science a chance,” cried June. “You've no idea

how devoted Pondridge is. He puts his science before everything.”

“Just,” replied Jolyon, puffing the mild cigarette to which he

was reduced, “as Mr. Paul Post puts his art, eh? Art for Art's

sake—Science for the sake of Science. I know those enthusiastic

egomaniac gentry. They vivisect you without blinking. I'm enough

of a Forsyte to give them the go-by, June.”

“Dad,” said June, “if you only knew how old-fashioned that

sounds! Nobody can afford to be half-hearted nowadays.”

“I'm afraid,” murmured Jolyon, with his smile, “that's the only

natural symptom with which Mr. Pondridge need not supply me. We

are born to be extreme or to be moderate, my dear; though, if

you'll forgive my saying so, half the people nowadays who believe

they're extreme are really very moderate. I'm getting on as well

as I can expect, and I must leave it at that.”

June was silent, having experienced in her time the inexorable

character of her father's amiable obstinacy so far as his own

freedom of action was concerned.

How he came to let her know why Irene had taken Jon to Spain

puzzled Jolyon, for he had little confidence in her discretion.

After she had brooded on the news, it brought a rather sharp

discussion, during which he perceived to the full the fundamental

opposition between her active temperament and his wife's

passivity. He even gathered that a little soreness still remained

from that generation-old struggle between them over the body of

Philip Bosinney, in which the passive had so signally triumphed

over the active principle.

According to June, it was foolish and even cowardly to hide the

past from Jon. Sheer opportunism, she called it.

“Which,” Jolyon put in mildly, “is the working principle of real

life, my dear.”

“Oh!” cried June, “you don't really defend her for not telling

Jon, Dad. If it were left to you, you would.”

“I might, but simply because I know he must find out, which will

be worse than if we told him.”

“Then why don't you tell him? It's just sleeping dogs again.”

“My dear,” said Jolyon, “I wouldn't for the world go against

Irene's instinct. He's her boy.”

“Yours too,” cried June.

“What is a man's instinct compared with a mother's?”

“Well, I think it's very weak of you.”

“I dare say,” said Jolyon, “I dare say.”

And that was all she got from him; but the matter rankled in her

brain. She could not bear sleeping dogs. And there stirred in her

a tortuous impulse to push the matter toward decision. Jon ought

to be told, so that either his feeling might be nipped in the

bud, or, flowering in spite of the past, come to fruition. And

she determined to see Fleur, and judge for herself. When June

determined on anything, delicacy became a somewhat minor

consideration. After all, she was Soames' cousin, and they were

both interested in pictures. She would go and tell him that he

ought to buy a Paul Post, or perhaps a piece of sculpture by

Boris Strumolowski, and of course she would say nothing to her

father. She went on the following Sunday, looking so determined

that she had some difficulty in getting a cab at Reading station.

The river country was lovely in those days of her own month, and

June ached at its loveliness. She who had passed through this

life without knowing what union was had a love of natural beauty

which was almost madness. And when she came to that choice spot

where Soames had pitched his tent, she dismissed her cab,

because, business over, she wanted to revel in the bright water

and the woods. She appeared at his front door, therefore, as a

mere pedestrian, and sent in her card. It was in June's character

to know that when her nerves were fluttering she was doing

something worth while. If one's nerves did not flutter, she was

taking the line of least resistance, and knew that nobleness was

not obliging her. She was conducted to a drawing-room, which,

though not in her style, showed every mark of fastidious

elegance. Thinking, 'Too much taste—too many knick-knacks,' she

saw in an old lacquer-framed mirror the figure of a girl coming

in from the verandah. Clothed in white, and holding some white

roses in her hand, she had, reflected in that silvery-grey pool

of glass, a vision-like appearance, as if a pretty ghost had come

out of the green garden.

“How do you do?” said June, turning round. “I'm a cousin of your

father's.”

“Oh, yes; I saw you in that confectioner's.”

“With my young stepbrother. Is your father in?”

“He will be directly. He's only gone for a little walk.”

June slightly narrowed her blue eyes, and lifted her decided

chin.

“Your name's Fleur, isn't it? I've heard of you from Holly. What

do you think of Jon?”

The girl lifted the roses in her hand, looked at them, and

answered calmly:

“He's quite a nice boy.”

“Not a bit like Holly or me, is he?”

“Not a bit.”

'She's cool,' thought June.

And suddenly the girl said: “I wish you'd tell me why our

families don't get on?”

Confronted with the question she had advised her father to

answer, June was silent; whether because this girl was trying to

get something out of her, or simply because what one would do

theoretically is not always what one will do when it comes to the

point.

“You know,” said the girl, “the surest way to make people find

out the worst is to keep them ignorant. My father's told me it

was a quarrel about property. But I don't believe it; we've both

got heaps. They wouldn't have been so bourgeois as all that.”

June flushed. The word applied to her grandfather and father

offended her.

“My grandfather,” she said, “was very generous, and my father is,

too; neither of them was in the least bourgeois.”

“Well, what was it then?” repeated the girl: Conscious that this

young Forsyte meant having what she wanted, June at once

determined to prevent her, and to get something for herself

instead.

“Why do you want to know?”

The girl smelled at her roses. “I only want to know because they

won't tell me.”

“Well, it was about property, but there's more than one kind.”

“That makes it worse. Now I really must know.”

June's small and resolute face quivered. She was wearing a round

cap, and her hair had fluffed out under it. She looked quite

young at that moment, rejuvenated by encounter.

“You know,” she said, “I saw you drop your handkerchief. Is there

anything between you and Jon? Because, if so, you'd better drop

that too.”

The girl grew paler, but she smiled.

“If there were, that isn't the way to make me.”

At the gallantry of that reply, June held out her hand.

“I like you; but I don't like your father; I never have. We may

as well be frank.”

“Did you come down to tell him that?”

June laughed. “No; I came down to see you.”

“How delightful of you.”

This girl could fence.

“I'm two and a half times your age,” said June, “but I quite

sympathize. It's horrid not to have one's own way.”

The girl smiled again. “I really think you might tell me.”

How the child stuck to her point

“It's not my secret. But I'll see what I can do, because I think

both you and Jon ought to be told. And now I'll say good-bye.”

“Won't you wait and see Father?”

June shook her head. “How can I get over to the other side?”

“I'll row you across.”

“Look!” said June impulsively, “next time you're in London, come

and see me. This is where I live. I generally have young people

in the evening. But I shouldn't tell your father that you're

coming.”

The girl nodded.

Watching her scull the skiff across, June thought: 'She's awfully

pretty and well made. I never thought Soames would have a

daughter as pretty as this. She and Jon would make a lovely

couple.

The instinct to couple, starved within herself, was always at

work in June. She stood watching Fleur row back; the girl took

her hand off a scull to wave farewell, and June walked languidly

on between the meadows and the river, with an ache in her heart.

Youth to youth, like the dragon-flies chasing each other, and

love like the sun warming them through and through. Her youth! So

long ago—when Phil and she—And since? Nothing—no one had been

quite what she had wanted. And so she had missed it all. But what

a coil was round those two young things, if they really were in

love, as Holly would have it—as her father, and Irene, and Soames

himself seemed to dread. What a coil, and what a barrier! And the

itch for the future, the contempt, as it were, for what was

overpast, which forms the active principle, moved in the heart of

one who ever believed that what one wanted was more important

than what other people did not want. From the bank, awhile, in

the warm summer stillness, she watched the water-lily plants and

willow leaves, the fishes rising; sniffed the scent of grass and

meadow-sweet, wondering how she could force everybody to be

happy. Jon and Fleur! Two little lame ducks—charming callow

yellow little ducks! A great pity! Surely something could be

done! One must not take such situations lying down. She walked

on, and reached a station, hot and cross.

That evening, faithful to the impulse toward direct action, which

made many people avoid her, she said to her father:

“Dad, I've been down to see young Fleur. I think she's very

attractive. It's no good hiding our heads under our wings, is

it?”

The startled Jolyon set down his barley-water, and began

crumbling his bread.

“It's what you appear to be doing,” he said. “Do you realise

whose daughter she is?”

“Can't the dead past bury its dead?”

Jolyon rose.

“Certain things can never be buried.”

“I disagree,” said June. “It's that which stands in the way of

all happiness and progress. You don't understand the Age, Dad.

It's got no use for outgrown things. Why do you think it matters

so terribly that Jon should know about his mother? Who pays any

attention to that sort of thing now? The marriage laws are just

as they were when Soames and Irene couldn't get a divorce, and

you had to come in. We've moved, and they haven't. So nobody

cares. Marriage without a decent chance of relief is only a sort

of slave-owning; people oughtn't to own each other. Everybody

sees that now. If Irene broke such laws, what does it matter?”

“It's not for me to disagree there,” said Jolyon; “but that's all

quite beside the mark. This is a matter of human feeling.”

“Of course it is,” cried June, “the human feeling of those two

young things.”

“My dear,” said Jolyon with gentle exasperation; “you're talking

nonsense.”

“I'm not. If they prove to be really fond of each other, why

should they be made unhappy because of the past?”

“You haven't lived that past. I have—through the feelings of my

wife; through my own nerves and my imagination, as only one who

is devoted can.”

June, too, rose, and began to wander restlessly.

“If,” she said suddenly, “she were the daughter of Philip

Bosinney, I could understand you better. Irene loved him, she

never loved Soames.”

Jolyon uttered a deep sound-the sort of noise an Italian peasant

woman utters to her mule. His heart had begun beating furiously,

but he paid no attention to it, quite carried away by his

feelings.

“That shows how little you understand. Neither I nor Jon, if I

know him, would mind a love-past. It's the brutality of a union

without love. This girl is the daughter of the man who once owned

Jon's mother as a negro-slave was owned. You can't lay that

ghost; don't try to, June! It's asking us to see Jon joined to

the flesh and blood of the man who possessed Jon's mother against

her will. It's no good mincing words; I want it clear once for

all. And now I mustn't talk any more, or I shall have to sit up

with this all night.” And, putting his hand over his heart,

Jolyon turned his back on his daughter and stood looking at the

river Thames.

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.

Soames had gone to look at a patch of ground on which the Local

Authorities were proposing to erect a Sanatorium for people with

weak lungs. Faithful to his native individualism, he took no part

in local affairs, content to pay the rates which were always

going up. He could not, however, remain indifferent to this new

and dangerous scheme. The site was not half a mile from his own

house. He was quite of opinion that the country should stamp out

tuberculosis; but this was not the place. It should be done

farther away. He took, indeed, an attitude common to all true

Forsytes, that disability of any sort in other people was not his

affair, and the State should do its business without prejudicing

in any way the natural advantages which he had acquired or

inherited. Francie, the most free-spirited Forsyte of his

generation (except perhaps that fellow Jolyon) had once asked him

in her malicious way: “Did you ever see the name Forsyte in a

subscription list, Soames?” That was as it might be, but a

Sanatorium would depreciate the neighbourhood, and he should

certainly sign the petition which was being got up against it.

Returning with this decision fresh within him, he saw Fleur

coming.

She was showing him more affection of late, and the quiet time

down here with her in this summer weather had been making him

feel quite young; Annette was always running up to Town for one

thing or another, so that he had Fleur to himself almost as much

as he could wish. To be sure, young Mont had formed a habit of

appearing on his motor-cycle almost every other day. Thank

goodness, the young fellow had shaved off his half-toothbrushes,

and no longer looked like a mountebank! With a girl friend of

Fleur's who was staying in the house, and a neighbouring youth or

so, they made two couples after dinner, in the hall, to the music

of the electric pianola, which performed Fox-trots unassisted,

with a surprised shine on its expressive surface. Annette, even,

now and then passed gracefully up and down in the arms of one or

other of the young men. And Soames, coming to the drawing-room

door, would lift his nose a little sideways, and watch them,

waiting to catch a smile from Fleur; then move back to his chair

by the drawing-room hearth, to peruse The Times or some other

collector's price list. To his ever-anxious eyes Fleur showed no

signs of remembering that caprice of hers.

When she reached him on the dusty road, he slipped his hand

within her arm.

“Who, do you think, has been to see you, Dad? She couldn't wait!

Guess!”

“I never guess,” said Soames uneasily. “Who?”

“Your cousin, June Forsyte.”

Quite unconsciously Soames gripped her arm. “What did she want?”

“I don't know. But it was rather breaking through the feud,

wasn't it?”

“Feud? What feud?”

“The one that exists in your imagination, dear.”

Soames dropped her arm. Was she mocking, or trying to draw him

on?

“I suppose she wanted me to buy a picture,” he said at last.

“I don't think so. Perhaps it was just family affection.”

“She's only a first cousin once removed,” muttered Soames.

“And the daughter of your enemy.”

“What d'you mean by that?”

“I beg your pardon, dear; I thought he was.”

“Enemy!” repeated Soames. “It's ancient history. I don't know

where you get your notions.”

“From June Forsyte.”

It had come to her as an inspiration that if he thought she knew,

or were on the edge of knowledge, he would tell her.

Soames was startled, but she had underrated his caution and

tenacity.

“If you know,” he said coldly, “why do you plague me?”

Fleur saw that she had overreached herself.

“I don't want to plague you, darling. As you say, why want to

know more? Why want to know anything of that 'small' mystery—Je

m'en fiche, as Profond says?”

“That chap!” said Soames profoundly.

That chap, indeed, played a considerable, if invisible, part this

summer—for he had not turned up again. Ever since the Sunday when

Fleur had drawn attention to him prowling on the lawn, Soames had

thought of him a good deal, and always in connection with

Annette, for no reason, except that she was looking handsomer

than for some time past. His possessive instinct, subtle, less

formal, more elastic since the War, kept all misgiving

underground. As one looks on some American river, quiet and

pleasant, knowing that an alligator perhaps is lying in the mud

with his snout just raised and indistinguishable from a snag of

wood—so Soames looked on the river of his own existence,

subconscious of Monsieur Profond, refusing to see more than the

suspicion of his snout. He had at this epoch in his life

practically all he wanted, and was as nearly happy as his nature

would permit. His senses were at rest; his affections found all

the vent they needed in his daughter; his collection was well

known, his money well invested; his health excellent, save for a

touch of liver now and again; he had not yet begun to worry

seriously about what would happen after death, inclining to think

that nothing would happen. He resembled one of his own gilt-edged

securities, and to knock the gilt off by seeing anything he could

avoid seeing would be, he felt instinctively, perverse and

retrogressive. Those two crumpled rose-leaves, Fleur's caprice

and Monsieur Profond's snout, would level away if he lay on them

industriously.

That evening Chance, which visits the lives of even the

best-invested Forsytes, put a clue into Fleur's hands. Her father

came down to dinner without a handkerchief, and had occasion to

blow his nose.

“I'll get you one, dear,” she had said, and ran upstairs. In the

sachet where she sought for it—an old sachet of very faded

silk—there were two compartments: one held handkerchiefs; the

other was buttoned, and contained something flat and hard. By

some childish impulse Fleur unbuttoned it. There was a frame and

in it a photograph of herself as a little girl. She gazed at it,

fascinated, as one is by one's own presentment. It slipped under

her fidgeting thumb, and she saw that another photograph was

behind. She pressed her own down further, and perceived a face,

which she seemed to know, of a young woman, very good-looking, in

a very old style of evening dress. Slipping her own photograph up

over it again, she took out a handkerchief and went down. Only on

the stairs did she identify that face. Surely—surely Jon's

mother! The conviction came as a shock. And she stood still in a

flurry of thought. Why, of course! Jon's father had married the

woman her father had wanted to marry, had cheated him out of her,

perhaps. Then, afraid of showing by her manner that she had

lighted on his secret, she refused to think further, and, shaking

out the silk handkerchief, entered the dining-room.

“I chose the softest, Father.”

“H'm!” said Soames; “I only use those after a cold. Never mind!”

That evening passed for Fleur in putting two and two together;

recalling the look on her father's face in the confectioner's

shop—a look strange and coldly intimate, a queer look. He must

have loved that woman very much to have kept her photograph all

this time, in spite of having lost her. Unsparing and

matter-of-fact, her mind darted to his relations with her own

mother. Had he ever really loved her? She thought not. Jon was

the son of the woman he had really loved. Surely, then, he ought

not to mind his daughter loving him; it only wanted getting used

to. And a sigh of sheer relief was caught in the folds of her

nightgown slipping over her head.

III.—MEETINGS

Youth only recognises Age by fits and starts. Jon, for one, had

never really seen his father's age till he came back from Spain.

The face of the fourth Jolyon, worn by waiting, gave him quite a

shock—it looked so wan and old. His father's mask had been forced

awry by the emotion of the meeting, so that the boy suddenly

realised how much he must have felt their absence. He summoned to

his aid the thought: 'Well, I didn't want to go!' It was out of

date for Youth to defer to Age. But Jon was by no means typically

modern. His father had always been “so jolly” to him, and to feel

that one meant to begin again at once the conduct which his

father had suffered six weeks' loneliness to cure was not

agreeable.

At the question, “Well, old man, how did the great Goya strike

you?” his conscience pricked him badly. The great Goya only

existed because he had created a face which resembled Fleur's.

On the night of their return, he went to bed full of compunction;

but awoke full of anticipation. It was only the fifth of July,

and no meeting was fixed with Fleur until the ninth. He was to

have three days at home before going back to farm. Somehow he

must contrive to see her!

In the lives of men an inexorable rhythm, caused by the need for

trousers, not even the fondest parents can deny. On the second

day, therefore, Jon went to Town, and having satisfied his

conscience by ordering what was indispensable in Conduit Street,

turned his face toward Piccadilly. Stratton Street, where her

Club was, adjoined Devonshire House. It would be the merest

chance that she should be at her Club. But he dawdled down Bond

Street with a beating heart, noticing the superiority of all

other young men to himself. They wore their clothes with such an

air; they had assurance; they were old. He was suddenly

overwhelmed by the conviction that Fleur must have forgotten him.

Absorbed in his own feeling for her all these weeks, he had

mislaid that possibility. The corners of his mouth drooped, his

hands felt clammy. Fleur with the pick of youth at the beck of

her smile-Fleur incomparable! It was an evil moment. Jon,

however, had a great idea that one must be able to face anything.

And he braced himself with that dour reflection in front of a

bric-a-brac shop. At this high-water mark of what was once the

London season, there was nothing to mark it out from any other

except a grey top hat or two, and the sun. Jon moved on, and

turning the corner into Piccadilly, ran into Val Dartie moving

toward the Iseeum Club, to which he had just been elected.

“Hallo! young man! Where are you off to?”

Jon gushed. “I've just been to my tailor's.”

Val looked him up and down. “That's good! I'm going in here to

order some cigarettes; then come and have some lunch.”

Jon thanked him. He might get news of her from Val!

The condition of England, that nightmare of its Press and Public

men, was seen in different perspective within the tobacconist's

which they now entered.

“Yes, sir; precisely the cigarette I used to supply your father

with. Bless me! Mr. Montague Dartie was a customer here from—let

me see—the year Melton won the Derby. One of my very best

customers he was.” A faint smile illumined the tobacconist's

face. “Many's the tip he's given me, to be sure! I suppose he

took a couple of hundred of these every week, year in, year out,

and never changed his cigarette. Very affable gentleman, brought

me a lot of custom. I was sorry he met with that accident. One

misses an old customer like him.”

Val smiled. His father's decease had closed an account which had

been running longer, probably, than any other; and in a ring of

smoke puffed out from that time-honoured cigarette he seemed to

see again his father's face, dark, good-looking, moustachioed, a

little puffy, in the only halo it had earned. His father had his

fame here, anyway—a man who smoked two hundred cigarettes a week,

who could give tips, and run accounts for ever! To his

tobacconist a hero! Even that was some distinction to inherit!

“I pay cash,” he said; “how much?”

“To his son, sir, and cash—ten and six. I shall never forget Mr.

Montague Dartie. I've known him stand talkin' to me half an hour.

We don't get many like him now, with everybody in such a hurry.

The War was bad for manners, sir—it was bad for manners. You were

in it, I see.”

“No,” said Val, tapping his knee, “I got this in the war before.

Saved my life, I expect. Do you want any cigarettes, Jon?”

Rather ashamed, Jon murmured, “I don't smoke, you know,” and saw

the tobacconist's lips twisted, as if uncertain whether to say

“Good God!” or “Now's your chance, sir!”

“That's right,” said Val; “keep off it while you can. You'll want

it when you take a knock. This is really the same tobacco, then?”

“Identical, sir; a little dearer, that's all. Wonderful staying

power—the British Empire, I always say.”

“Send me down a hundred a week to this address, and invoice it

monthly. Come on, Jon.”

Jon entered the Iseeum with curiosity. Except to lunch now and

then at the Hotch-Potch with his father, he had never been in a

London Club. The Iseeum, comfortable and unpretentious, did not

move, could not, so long as George Forsyte sat on its Committee,

where his culinary acumen was almost the controlling force. The

Club had made a stand against the newly rich, and it had taken

all George Forsyte's prestige, and praise of him as a “good

sportsman,” to bring in Prosper Profond.

The two were lunching together when the half-brothers-in-law

entered the dining-room, and attracted by George's forefinger,

sat down at their table, Val with his shrewd eyes and charming

smile, Jon with solemn lips and an attractive shyness in his

glance. There was an air of privilege around that corner table,

as though past masters were eating there. Jon was fascinated by

the hypnotic atmosphere. The waiter, lean in the chaps, pervaded

with such free-masonical deference. He seemed to hang on George

Forsyte's lips, to watch the gloat in his eye with a kind of

sympathy, to follow the movements of the heavy club-marked silver

fondly. His liveried arm and confidential voice alarmed Jon, they

came so secretly over his shoulder.

Except for George's “Your grandfather tipped me once; he was a

deuced good judge of a cigar!” neither he nor the other past

master took any notice of him, and he was grateful for this. The

talk was all about the breeding, points, and prices of horses,

and he listened to it vaguely at first, wondering how it was

possible to retain so much knowledge in a head. He could not take

his eyes off the dark past master—what he said was so deliberate

and discouraging—such heavy, queer, smiled-out words. Jon was

thinking of butterflies, when he heard him say:

“I want to see Mr. Soames Forsyde take an interest in 'orses.”

“Old Soames! He's too dry a file!”

With all his might Jon tried not to grow red, while the dark past

master went on.

“His daughter's an attractive small girl. Mr. Soames Forsyde is a

bit old-fashioned. I want to see him have a pleasure some day.”

George Forsyte grinned.

“Don't you worry; he's not so miserable as he looks. He'll never

show he's enjoying anything—they might try and take it from him.

Old Soames! Once bit, twice shy!”

“Well, Jon,” said Val, hastily, “if you've finished, we'll go and

have coffee.”

“Who were those?” Jon asked, on the stairs. “I didn't quite—-”

“Old George Forsyte is a first cousin of your father's and of my

Uncle Soames. He's always been here. The other chap, Profond, is

a queer fish. I think he's hanging round Soames' wife, if you ask

me!”

Jon looked at him, startled. “But that's awful,” he said: “I

mean—for Fleur.”

“Don't suppose Fleur cares very much; she's very up-to-date.”

“Her mother!”

“You're very green, Jon.”

Jon grew red. “Mothers,” he stammered angrily, “are different.”

“You're right,” said Val suddenly; “but things aren't what they

were when I was your age. There's a 'To-morrow we die' feeling.

That's what old George meant about my Uncle Soames. He doesn't

mean to die to-morrow.”

Jon said, quickly: “What's the matter between him and my father?”

“Stable secret, Jon. Take my advice, and bottle up. You'll do no

good by knowing. Have a liqueur?”

Jon shook his head.

“I hate the way people keep things from one,” he muttered, “and

then sneer at one for being green.”

“Well, you can ask Holly. If she won't tell you, you'll believe

it's for your own good, I suppose.”

Jon got up. “I must go now; thanks awfully for the lunch.”

Val smiled up at him half-sorry, and yet amused. The boy looked

so upset.

“All right! See you on Friday.”

“I don't know,” murmured Jon.

And he did not. This conspiracy of silence made him desperate. It

was humiliating to be treated like a child! He retraced his moody

steps to Stratton Street. But he would go to her Club now, and

find out the worst! To his enquiry the reply was that Miss

Forsyte was not in the Club. She might be in perhaps later. She

was often in on Monday—they could not say. Jon said he would call

again, and, crossing into the Green Park, flung himself down

under a tree. The sun was bright, and a breeze fluttered the

leaves of the young lime-tree beneath which he lay; but his heart

ached. Such darkness seemed gathered round his happiness. He

heard Big Ben chime “Three” above the traffic. The sound moved

something in him, and, taking out a piece of paper, he began to

scribble on it with a pencil. He had jotted a stanza, and was

searching the grass for another verse, when something hard

touched his shoulder-a green parasol. There above him stood

Fleur!

“They told me you'd been, and were coming back. So I thought you

might be out here; and you are—it's rather wonderful!”

“Oh, Fleur! I thought you'd have forgotten me.”

“When I told you that I shouldn't!”

Jon seized her arm.

“It's too much luck! Let's get away from this side.” He almost

dragged her on through that too thoughtfully regulated Park, to

find some cover where they could sit and hold each other's hands.

“Hasn't anybody cut in?” he said, gazing round at her lashes, in

suspense above her cheeks.

“There is a young idiot, but he doesn't count.”

Jon felt a twitch of compassion for the-young idiot.

“You know I've had sunstroke; I didn't tell you.”

“Really! Was it interesting?”

“No. Mother was an angel. Has anything happened to you?”

“Nothing. Except that I think I've found out what's wrong between

our families, Jon.”

His heart began beating very fast.

“I believe my father wanted to marry your mother, and your father

got her instead.”

“Oh!”

“I came on a photo of her; it was in a frame behind a photo of

me. Of course, if he was very fond of her, that would have made

him pretty mad, wouldn't it?”

Jon thought for a minute. “Not if she loved my father best.”

“But suppose they were engaged?”

“If we were engaged, and you found you loved somebody better, I

might go cracked, but I shouldn't grudge it you.”

“I should. You mustn't ever do that with me, Jon.

“My God! Not much!”

“I don't believe that he's ever really cared for my mother.”

Jon was silent. Val's words—the two past masters in the Club!

“You see, we don't know,” went on Fleur; “it may have been a

great shock. She may have behaved badly to him. People do.”

“My mother wouldn't.”

Fleur shrugged her shoulders. “I don't think we know much about

our fathers and mothers. We just see them in the light of the way

they treat us; but they've treated other people, you know, before

we were born-plenty, I expect. You see, they're both old. Look at

your father, with three separate families!”

“Isn't there any place,” cried Jon, “in all this beastly London

where we can be alone?”

“Only a taxi.”

“Let's get one, then.”

When they were installed, Fleur asked suddenly: “Are you going

back to Robin Hill? I should like to see where you live, Jon. I'm

staying with my aunt for the night, but I could get back in time

for dinner. I wouldn't come to the house, of course.”

Jon gazed at her enraptured.

“Splendid! I can show it you from the copse, we shan't meet

anybody. There's a train at four.”

The god of property and his Forsytes great and small, leisured,

official, commercial, or professional, like the working classes,

still worked their seven hours a day, so that those two of the

fourth generation travelled down to Robin Hill in an empty

first-class carriage, dusty and sun-warmed, of that too early

train. They travelled in blissful silence, holding each other's

hands.

At the station they saw no one except porters, and a villager or

two unknown to Jon, and walked out up the lane, which smelled of

dust and honeysuckle.

For Jon—sure of her now, and without separation before him—it was

a miraculous dawdle, more wonderful than those on the Downs, or

along the river Thames. It was love-in-a-mist—one of those

illumined pages of Life, where every word and smile, and every

light touch they gave each other were as little gold and red and

blue butterflies and flowers and birds scrolled in among the

text—a happy communing, without afterthought, which lasted

thirty-seven minutes. They reached the coppice at the milking

hour. Jon would not take her as far as the farmyard; only to

where she could see the field leading up to the gardens, and the

house beyond. They turned in among the larches, and suddenly, at

the winding of the path, came on Irene, sitting on an old log

seat.

There are various kinds of shocks: to the vertebrae; to the

nerves; to moral sensibility; and, more potent and permanent, to

personal dignity. This last was the shock Jon received, coming

thus on his mother. He became suddenly conscious that he was

doing an indelicate thing. To have brought Fleur down openly—yes!

But to sneak her in like this! Consumed with shame, he put on a

front as brazen as his nature would permit.

Fleur was smiling, a little defiantly; his mother's startled face

was changing quickly to the impersonal and gracious. It was she

who uttered the first words:

“I'm very glad to see you. It was nice of Jon to think of

bringing you down to us.”

“We weren't coming to the house,” Jon blurted out. “I just wanted

Fleur to see where I lived.”

His mother said quietly:

“Won't you come up and have tea?”

Feeling that he had but aggravated his breach of breeding, he

heard Fleur answer:

“Thanks very much; I have to get back to dinner. I met Jon by

accident, and we thought it would be rather jolly just to see his

home.”

How self-possessed she was!

“Of course; but you must have tea. We'll send you down to the

station. My husband will enjoy seeing you.”

The expression of his mother's eyes, resting on him for a moment,

cast Jon down level with the ground—a true worm. Then she led on,

and Fleur followed her. He felt like a child, trailing after

those two, who were talking so easily about Spain and Wansdon,

and the house up there beyond the trees and the grassy slope. He

watched the fencing of their eyes, taking each other in—the two

beings he loved most in the world.

He could see his father sitting under the oaktree; and suffered

in advance all the loss of caste he must go through in the eyes

of that tranquil figure, with his knees crossed, thin, old, and

elegant; already he could feel the faint irony which would come

into his voice and smile.

“This is Fleur Forsyte, Jolyon; Jon brought her down to see the

house. Let's have tea at once—she has to catch a train. Jon, tell

them, dear, and telephone to the Dragon for a car.”

To leave her alone with them was strange, and yet, as no doubt

his mother had foreseen, the least of evils at the moment; so he

ran up into the house. Now he would not see Fleur alone again—not

for a minute, and they had arranged no further meeting! When he

returned under cover of the maids and teapots, there was not a

trace of awkwardness beneath the tree; it was all within himself,

but not the less for that. They were talking of the Gallery off

Cork Street.

“We back numbers,” his father was saying, “are awfully anxious to

find out why we can't appreciate the new stuff; you and Jon must

tell us.”

“It's supposed to be satiric, isn't it?” said Fleur.

He saw his father's smile.

“Satiric? Oh! I think it's more than that. What do you say, Jon?”

“I don't know at all,” stammered Jon. His father's face had a

sudden grimness.

“The young are tired of us, our gods and our ideals. Off with

their heads, they say—smash their idols! And let's get back

to-nothing! And, by Jove, they've done it! Jon's a poet. He'll be

going in, too, and stamping on what's left of us. Property,

beauty, sentiment—all smoke. We mustn't own anything nowadays,

not even our feelings. They stand in the way of—Nothing.”

Jon listened, bewildered, almost outraged by his father's words,

behind which he felt a meaning that he could not reach. He didn't

want to stamp on anything!

“Nothing's the god of to-day,” continued Jolyon; “we're back

where the Russians were sixty years ago, when they started

Nihilism.”

“No, Dad,” cried Jon suddenly, “we only want to live, and we

don't know how, because of the Past—that's all!”

“By George!” said Jolyon, “that's profound, Jon. Is it your own?

The Past! Old ownerships, old passions, and their aftermath.

Let's have cigarettes.”

Conscious that his mother had lifted her hand to her lips,

quickly, as if to hush something, Jon handed the cigarettes. He

lighted his father's and Fleur's, then one for himself. Had he

taken the knock that Val had spoken of? The smoke was blue when

he had not puffed, grey when he had; he liked the sensation in

his nose, and the sense of equality it gave him. He was glad no

one said: “So you've begun!” He felt less young.

Fleur looked at her watch, and rose. His mother went with her

into the house. Jon stayed with his father, puffing at the

cigarette.

“See her into the car, old man,” said Jolyon; “and when she's

gone, ask your mother to come back to me.”

Jon went. He waited in the hall. He saw her into the car. There

was no chance for any word; hardly for a pressure of the hand. He

waited all that evening for something to be said to him. Nothing

was said. Nothing might have happened. He went up to bed, and in

the mirror on his dressing-table met himself. He did not speak,

nor did the image; but both looked as if they thought the more.

IV.—IN GREEN STREET

Uncertain whether the impression that Prosper Profond was

dangerous should be traced to his attempt to give Val the Mayfly

filly; to a remark of Fleur's: “He's like the hosts of Midian—he

prowls and prowls around”; to his preposterous inquiry of Jack

Cardigan: “What's the use of keepin' fit?” or, more simply, to

the fact that he was a foreigner, or alien as it was now called.

Certain, that Annette was looking particularly handsome, and that

Soames—had sold him a Gauguin and then torn up the cheque, so

that Monsieur Profond himself had said: “I didn't get that small

picture I bought from Mr. Forsyde.”

However suspiciously regarded, he still frequented Winifred's

evergreen little house in Green Street, with a good-natured

obtuseness which no one mistook for naivete, a word hardly

applicable to Monsieur Prosper Profond. Winifred still found him

“amusing,” and would write him little notes saying: “Come and

have a 'jolly' with us”—it was breath of life to her to keep up

with the phrases of the day.

The mystery, with which all felt him to be surrounded, was due to

his having done, seen, heard, and known everything, and found

nothing in it—which was unnatural. The English type of

disillusionment was familiar enough to Winifred, who had always

moved in fashionable circles. It gave a certain cachet or

distinction, so that one got something out of it. But to see

nothing in anything, not as a pose, but because there was nothing

in anything, was not English; and that which was not English one

could not help secretly feeling dangerous, if not precisely bad

form. It was like having the mood which the War had left,

seated—dark, heavy, smiling, indifferent—in your Empire chair; it

was like listening to that mood talking through thick pink lips

above a little diabolic beard. It was, as Jack Cardigan expressed

it—for the English character at large—“a bit too thick”—for if

nothing was really worth getting excited about, there were always

games, and one could make it so! Even Winifred, ever a Forsyte at

heart, felt that there was nothing to be had out of such a mood

of disillusionment, so that it really ought not to be there.

Monsieur Profond, in fact, made the mood too plain in a country

which decently veiled such realities.

When Fleur, after her hurried return from Robin Hill, came down

to dinner that evening, the mood was standing at the window of

Winifred's little drawing-room, looking out into Green Street,

with an air of seeing nothing in it. And Fleur gazed promptly

into the fireplace with an air of seeing a fire which was not

there.

Monsieur Profond came from the window. He was in full fig, with a

white waistcoat and a white flower in his buttonhole.

“Well, Miss Forsyde,” he said, “I'm awful pleased to see you. Mr.

Forsyde well? I was sayin' to-day I want to see him have some

pleasure. He worries.”

“You think so?” said Fleur shortly.

“Worries,” repeated Monsieur Profond, burring the r's.

Fleur spun round. “Shall I tell you,” she said, “what would give

him pleasure?” But the words, “To hear that you had cleared out,”

died at the expression on his face. All his fine white teeth were

showing.

“I was hearin' at the Club to-day about his old trouble.” Fleur

opened her eyes. “What do you mean?”

Monsieur Profond moved his sleek head as if to minimize his

statement.

“Before you were born,” he said; “that small business.”

Though conscious that he had cleverly diverted her from his own

share in her father's worry, Fleur was unable to withstand a rush

of nervous curiosity. “Tell me what you heard.”

“Why!” murmured Monsieur Profond, “you know all that.”

“I expect I do. But I should like to know that you haven't heard

it all wrong.”

“His first wife,” murmured Monsieur Profond.

Choking back the words, “He was never married before,” she said:

“Well, what about her?”

“Mr. George Forsyde was tellin' me about your father's first wife

marryin' his cousin Jolyon afterward. It was a small bit

unpleasant, I should think. I saw their boy—nice boy!”

Fleur looked up. Monsieur Profond was swimming, heavily

diabolical, before her. That—the reason! With the most heroic

effort of her life so far, she managed to arrest that swimming

figure. She could not tell whether he had noticed. And just then

Winifred came in.

“Oh! here you both are already; Imogen and I have had the most

amusing afternoon at the Babies' bazaar.”

“What babies?” said Fleur mechanically.

“The 'Save the Babies.' I got such a bargain, my dear. A piece of

old Armenian work—from before the Flood. I want your opinion on

it, Prosper.”

“Auntie,” whispered Fleur suddenly.

At the tone in the girl's voice Winifred closed in on her.'

“What's the matter? Aren't you well?”

Monsieur Profond had withdrawn into the window, where he was

practically out of hearing.

“Auntie, he-he told me that father has been married before. Is it

true that he divorced her, and she married Jon Forsyte's father?”

Never in all the life of the mother of four little Darties had

Winifred felt more seriously embarrassed. Her niece's face was so

pale, her eyes so dark, her voice so whispery and strained.

“Your father didn't wish you to hear,” she said, with all the

aplomb she could muster. “These things will happen. I've often

told him he ought to let you know.”

“Oh!” said Fleur, and that was all, but it made Winifred pat her

shoulder—a firm little shoulder, nice and white! She never could

help an appraising eye and touch in the matter of her niece, who

would have to be married, of course—though not to that boy Jon.

“We've forgotten all about it years and years ago,” she said

comfortably. “Come and have dinner!”

“No, Auntie. I don't feel very well. May I go upstairs?”

“My dear!” murmured Winifred, concerned, “you're not taking this

to heart? Why, you haven't properly come out yet! That boy's a

child!”

“What boy? I've only got a headache. But I can't stand that man

to-night.”

“Well, well,” said Winifred, “go and lie down. I'll send you some

bromide, and I shall talk to Prosper Profond. What business had

he to gossip? Though I must say I think it's much better you

should know.”

Fleur smiled. “Yes,” she said, and slipped from the room.

She went up with her head whirling, a dry sensation in her

throat, a guttered frightened feeling in her breast. Never in her

life as yet had she suffered from even momentary fear that she

would not get what she had set her heart on. The sensations of

the afternoon had been full and poignant, and this gruesome

discovery coming on the top of them had really made her head

ache. No wonder her father had hidden that photograph, so

secretly behind her own-ashamed of having kept it! But could he

hate Jon's mother and yet keep her photograph? She pressed her

hands over her forehead, trying to see things clearly. Had they

told Jon—had her visit to Robin Hill forced them to tell him?

Everything now turned on that! She knew, they all knew,

except—perhaps—Jon!

She walked up and down, biting her lip and thinking desperately

hard. Jon loved his mother. If they had told him, what would he

do? She could not tell. But if they had not told him, should she

not—could she not get him for herself—get married to him, before

he knew? She searched her memories of Robin Hill. His mother's

face so passive—with its dark eyes and as if powdered hair, its

reserve, its smile—baffled her; and his father's—kindly, sunken,

ironic. Instinctively she felt they would shrink from telling

Jon, even now, shrink from hurting him—for of course it would

hurt him awfully to know!

Her aunt must be made not to tell her father that she knew. So

long as neither she herself nor Jon were supposed to know, there

was still a chance—freedom to cover one's tracks, and get what

her heart was set on. But she was almost overwhelmed by her

isolation. Every one's hand was against her—every one's! It was

as Jon had said—he and she just wanted to live and the past was

in their way, a past they hadn't shared in, and didn't

understand! Oh! What a shame! And suddenly she thought of June.

Would she help them? For somehow June had left on her the

impression that she would be sympathetic with their love,

impatient of obstacle. Then, instinctively, she thought: 'I won't

give anything away, though, even to her. I daren't. I mean to

have Jon; against them all.'

Soup was brought up to her, and one of Winifred's pet headache

cachets. She swallowed both. Then Winifred herself appeared.

Fleur opened her campaign with the words:

“You know, Auntie, I do wish people wouldn't think I'm in love

with that boy. Why, I've hardly seen him!”

Winifred, though experienced, was not “fine.” She accepted the

remark with considerable relief. Of course, it was not pleasant

for the girl to hear of the family scandal, and she set herself

to minimise the matter, a task for which she was eminently

qualified, “raised” fashionably under a comfortable mother and a

father whose nerves might not be shaken, and for many years the

wife of Montague Dartie. Her description was a masterpiece of

understatement. Fleur's father's first wife had been very

foolish. There had been a young man who had got run over, and she

had left Fleur's father. Then, years after, when it might all

have come—right again, she had taken up with their cousin Jolyon;

and, of course, her father had been obliged to have a divorce.

Nobody remembered anything of it now, except just the family.

And, perhaps, it had all turned out for the best; her father had

Fleur; and Jolyon and Irene had been quite happy, they said, and

their boy was a nice boy. “Val having Holly, too, is a sort of

plaster, don't you know?” With these soothing words, Winifred

patted her niece's shoulder; thought: 'She's a nice, plump little

thing!' and went back to Prosper Profond, who, in spite of his

indiscretion, was very “amusing” this evening.

For some minutes after her aunt had gone Fleur remained under

influence of bromide material and spiritual. But then reality

came back. Her aunt had left out all that mattered—all the

feeling, the hate, the love, the unforgivingness of passionate

hearts. She, who knew so little of life, and had touched only the

fringe of love, was yet aware by instinct that words have as

little relation to fact and feeling as coin to the bread it buys.

'Poor Father!' she thought. 'Poor me! Poor Jon! But I don't care,

I mean to have him!' From the window of her darkened room she saw

“that man” issue from the door below and “prowl” away. If he and

her mother—how would that affect her chance? Surely it must make

her father cling to her more closely, so that he would consent in

the end to anything she wanted, or become reconciled the sooner

to what she did without his knowledge.

She took some earth from the flower-box in the window, and with

all her might flung it after that disappearing figure. It fell

short, but the action did her good.

And a little puff of air came up from Green Street, smelling of

petrol, not sweet.

V.—PURELY FORSYTE AFFAIRS