was mystery—­the air, as it were, composed of that romantic quality.  Jon sniffed its freshness, and stared at the bluebells in the sharpening light.  Fleur!  It rhymed with her!  And she lived at Mapleduram—­a jolly name, too, on the river somewhere.  He could find it in the atlas presently.  He would write to her.  But would she answer?  Oh!  She must.  She had said “Au revoir!” Not good-bye!  What luck that she had dropped her handkerchief!  He would never have known her but for that.  And the more he thought of that handkerchief, the more amazing his luck seemed.  Fleur!  It certainly rhymed with her!  Rhythm thronged his head; words jostled to be joined together; he was on the verge of a poem.

Jon remained in this condition for more than half an hour, then returned to the house, and getting a ladder, climbed in at his bedroom window out of sheer exhilaration.  Then, remembering that the study window was open, he went down and shut it, first removing the ladder, so as to obliterate all traces of his feeling.  The thing was too deep to be revealed to mortal soul-even-to his mother.

IV

THE MAUSOLEUM

There are houses whose souls have passed into the limbo of Time, leaving their bodies in the limbo of London.  Such was not quite the condition of “Timothy’s” on the Bayswater Road, for Timothy’s soul still had one foot in Timothy Forsyte’s body, and Smither kept the atmosphere unchanging, of camphor and port wine and house whose windows are only opened to air it twice a day.

To Forsyte imagination that house was now a sort of Chinese pill-box, a series of layers in the last of which was Timothy.  One did not reach him, or so it was reported by members of the family who, out of old-time habit or absentmindedness, would drive up once in a blue moon and ask after their surviving uncle.  Such were Francie, now quite emancipated from God (she frankly avowed atheism), Euphemia, emancipated from old Nicholas, and Winifred Dartie from her “man of the world.”  But, after all, everybody was emancipated now, or said they were—­perhaps not quite the same thing!

When Soames, therefore, took it on his way to Paddington station on the morning after that encounter, it was hardly with the expectation of seeing Timothy in the flesh.  His heart made a faint demonstration within him while he stood in full south sunlight on the newly whitened doorstep of that little house where four Forsytes had once lived, and now but one dwelt on like a winter fly; the house into which Soames had come and out of which he had gone times without number, divested of, or burdened with, fardels of family gossip; the house of the “old people” of another century, another age.

The sight of Smither—­still corseted up to the armpits because the new fashion which came in as they were going out about 1903 had never been considered “nice” by Aunts Juley and Hester—­brought a pale friendliness to Soames’ lips; Smither, still faithfully arranged to old pattern in every detail, an invaluable servant—­none such left—­smiling back at him, with the words:  “Why! it’s Mr. Soames, after all this time!  And how are you, sir?  Mr. Timothy will be so pleased to know you’ve been.”