June had not yet spoken.  Perched thus on the arm of his chair, with her head above him, her face was invisible.  But presently he felt her warm cheek against his own, and knew that, at all events, there was nothing very alarming in her attitude towards his news.  He began to take courage.

“You’ll like your father,” he said—­“an amiable chap.  Never was much push about him, but easy to get on with.  You’ll find him artistic and all that.”

And old Jolyon bethought him of the dozen or so water-colour drawings all carefully locked up in his bedroom; for now that his son was going to become a man of property he did not think them quite such poor things as heretofore.

“As to your—­your stepmother,” he said, using the word with some little difficulty, “I call her a refined woman—­a bit of a Mrs. Gummidge, I shouldn’t wonder—­but very fond of Jo.  And the children,” he repeated—­indeed, this sentence ran like music through all his solemn self-justification—­“are sweet little things!”

If June had known, those words but reincarnated that tender love for little children, for the young and weak, which in the past had made him desert his son for her tiny self, and now, as the cycle rolled, was taking him from her.

But he began to get alarmed at her silence, and asked impatiently:  “Well, what do you say?”

June slid down to his knee, and she in her turn began her tale.  She thought it would all go splendidly; she did not see any difficulty, and she did not care a bit what people thought.

Old Jolyon wriggled.  H’m! then people would think!  He had thought that after all these years perhaps they wouldn’t!  Well, he couldn’t help it!  Nevertheless, he could not approve of his granddaughter’s way of putting it—­she ought to mind what people thought!

Yet he said nothing.  His feelings were too mixed, too inconsistent for expression.

No—­went on June he did not care; what business was it of theirs?  There was only one thing—­and with her cheek pressing against his knee, old Jolyon knew at once that this something was no trifle:  As he was going to buy a house in the country, would he not—­to please her—­buy that splendid house of Soames’ at Robin Hill?  It was finished, it was perfectly beautiful, and no one would live in it now.  They would all be so happy there.

Old Jolyon was on the alert at once.  Wasn’t the ‘man of property’ going to live in his new house, then?  He never alluded to Soames now but under this title.

“No”—­June said—­“he was not; she knew that he was not!”

How did she know?

She could not tell him, but she knew.  She knew nearly for certain!  It was most unlikely; circumstances had changed!  Irene’s words still rang in her head:  “I have left Soames.  Where should I go?”

But she kept silence about that.

If her grandfather would only buy it and settle that wretched claim that ought never to have been made on Phil!  It would be the very best thing for everybody, and everything—­everything might come straight.