“I had hoped that the memory of old sores would not be allowed to stand in the way of what is a pleasure and a profit to me and my little grand-daughter.  But old men learn to forego their whims; they are obliged to, even the whim to live must be foregone sooner or later; and perhaps the sooner the better.  “My love to you, “Jolyon Forsyte.”

‘Bitter,’ he thought, ‘but I can’t help it.  I’m tired.’  He sealed and dropped it into the box for the evening post, and hearing it fall to the bottom, thought:  ‘There goes all I’ve looked forward to!’

That evening after dinner which he scarcely touched, after his cigar which he left half-smoked for it made him feel faint, he went very slowly upstairs and stole into the night-nursery.  He sat down on the window-seat.  A night-light was burning, and he could just see Holly’s face, with one hand underneath the cheek.  An early cockchafer buzzed in the Japanese paper with which they had filled the grate, and one of the horses in the stable stamped restlessly.  To sleep like that child!  He pressed apart two rungs of the venetian blind and looked out.  The moon was rising, blood-red.  He had never seen so red a moon.  The woods and fields out there were dropping to sleep too, in the last glimmer of the summer light.  And beauty, like a spirit, walked.  ‘I’ve had a long life,’ he thought, ’the best of nearly everything.  I’m an ungrateful chap; I’ve seen a lot of beauty in my time.  Poor young Bosinney said I had a sense of beauty.  There’s a man in the moon to-night!’ A moth went by, another, another.  ‘Ladies in grey!’ He closed his eyes.  A feeling that he would never open them again beset him; he let it grow, let himself sink; then, with a shiver, dragged the lids up.  There was something wrong with him, no doubt, deeply wrong; he would have to have the doctor after all.  It didn’t much matter now!  Into that coppice the moon-light would have crept; there would be shadows, and those shadows would be the only things awake.  No birds, beasts, flowers, insects; Just the shadows—­moving; ‘Ladies in grey!’ Over that log they would climb; would whisper together.  She and Bosinney!  Funny thought!  And the frogs and little things would whisper too!  How the clock ticked, in here!  It was all eerie—­out there in the light of that red moon; in here with the little steady night-light and, the ticking clock and the nurse’s dressing-gown hanging from the edge of the screen, tall, like a woman’s figure.  ‘Lady in grey!’ And a very odd thought beset him:  Did she exist?  Had she ever come at all?  Or was she but the emanation of all the beauty he had loved and must leave so soon?  The violet-grey spirit with the dark eyes and the crown of amber hair, who walks the dawn and the moonlight, and at blue-bell time?  What was she, who was she, did she exist?  He rose and stood a moment clutching the window-sill, to give him a sense of reality again; then began tiptoeing towards the door.