He sought his room slowly.  They never gave him the same, and he could not get used to these ‘spick-and-spandy’ bedrooms with new furniture and grey-green carpets sprinkled all over with pink roses.  He was wakeful and that wretched Habanera kept throbbing in his head.

His French had never been equal to its words, but its sense he knew, if it had any sense, a gipsy thing—­wild and unaccountable.  Well, there was in life something which upset all your care and plans—­something which made men and women dance to its pipes.  And he lay staring from deep-sunk eyes into the darkness where the unaccountable held sway.  You thought you had hold of life, but it slipped away behind you, took you by the scruff of the neck, forced you here and forced you there, and then, likely as not, squeezed life out of you!  It took the very stars like that, he shouldn’t wonder, rubbed their noses together and flung them apart; it had never done playing its pranks.  Five million people in this great blunderbuss of a town, and all of them at the mercy of that Life-Force, like a lot of little dried peas hopping about on a board when you struck your fist on it.  Ah, well!  Himself would not hop much longer—­a good long sleep would do him good!

How hot it was up here!—­how noisy!  His forehead burned; she had kissed it just where he always worried; just there—­as if she had known the very place and wanted to kiss it all away for him.  But, instead, her lips left a patch of grievous uneasiness.  She had never spoken in quite that voice, had never before made that lingering gesture or looked back at him as she drove away.

He got out of bed and pulled the curtains aside; his room faced down over the river.  There was little air, but the sight of that breadth of water flowing by, calm, eternal, soothed him.  ‘The great thing,’ he thought ’is not to make myself a nuisance.  I’ll think of my little sweet, and go to sleep.’  But it was long before the heat and throbbing of the London night died out into the short slumber of the summer morning.  And old Jolyon had but forty winks.

When he reached home next day he went out to the flower garden, and with the help of Holly, who was very delicate with flowers, gathered a great bunch of carnations.  They were, he told her, for ’the lady in grey’—­a name still bandied between them; and he put them in a bowl in his study where he meant to tackle Irene the moment she came, on the subject of June and future lessons.  Their fragrance and colour would help.  After lunch he lay down, for he felt very tired, and the carriage would not bring her from the station till four o’clock.  But as the hour approached he grew restless, and sought the schoolroom, which overlooked the drive.  The sun-blinds were down, and Holly was there with Mademoiselle Beauce, sheltered from the heat of a stifling July day, attending to their silkworms.  Old Jolyon had a natural antipathy to these methodical creatures, whose heads and colour