To himself, however, he had said:  ’But he won’t take to it.  I give him four years.  Still, it’s healthy, and harmless.’

After turning the matter over and consulting with Irene, he wrote to his daughter, Mrs. Val Dartie, asking if they knew of a farmer near them on the Downs who would take Jon as an apprentice.  Holly’s answer had been enthusiastic.  There was an excellent man quite close; she and Val would love Jon to live with them.

The boy was due to go to-morrow.

Sipping weak tea with lemon in it, Jolyon gazed through the leaves of the old oak-tree at that view which had appeared to him desirable for thirty-two years.  The tree beneath which he sat seemed not a day older!  So young, the little leaves of brownish gold; so old, the whitey-grey-green of its thick rough trunk.  A tree of memories, which would live on hundreds of years yet, unless some barbarian cut it down—­would see old England out at the pace things were going!  He remembered a night three years before, when, looking from his window, with his arm close round Irene, he had watched a German aeroplane hovering, it seemed, right over the old tree.  Next day they had found a bomb hole in a field on Gage’s farm.  That was before he knew that he was under sentence of death.  He could almost have wished the bomb had finished him.  It would have saved a lot of hanging about, many hours of cold fear in the pit of his stomach.  He had counted on living to the normal Forsyte age of eighty-five or more, when Irene would be seventy.  As it was, she would miss him.  Still there was Jon, more important in her life than himself; Jon, who adored his mother.

Under that tree, where old Jolyon—­waiting for Irene to come to him across the lawn—­had breathed his last, Jolyon wondered, whimsically, whether, having put everything in such perfect order, he had not better close his own eyes and drift away.  There was something undignified in o parasitically clinging on to the effortless close of a life wherein he regretted two things only—­the long division between his father and himself when he was young, and the lateness of his union o with Irene.

From where he sat he could see a cluster of apple-trees in blossom.  Nothing in Nature moved him so much as fruit-trees in blossom; and his heart ached suddenly because he might never see them flower again.  Spring!  Decidedly no man ought to have to die while his heart was still young enough to love beauty!  Blackbirds sang recklessly in the shrubbery, swallows were flying high, the leaves above him glistened; and over the fields was every imaginable tint of early foliage, burnished by the level sunlight, away to where the distant “smoke-bush” blue was trailed along the horizon.  Irene’s flowers in their narrow beds had startling individuality that evening, little deep assertions of gay life.  Only Chinese and Japanese painters, and perhaps Leonardo, had known how to get that startling little ego into