With compunction tweaking at his chest Soames descended the stairs, where was always that rather pleasant smell of camphor and port wine, and house where draughts are not permitted.  The poor old things—­he had not meant to be unkind!  And in the street he instantly forgot them, repossessed by the image of Annette and the thought of the cursed coil around him.  Why had he not pushed the thing through and obtained divorce when that wretched Bosinney was run over, and there was evidence galore for the asking!  And he turned towards his sister Winifred Dartie’s residence in Green Street, Mayfair.

CHAPTER II

EXIT A MAN OF THE WORLD

That a man of the world so subject to the vicissitudes of fortunes as Montague Dartie should still be living in a house he had inhabited twenty years at least would have been more noticeable if the rent, rates, taxes, and repairs of that house had not been defrayed by his father-in-law.  By that simple if wholesale device James Forsyte had secured a certain stability in the lives of his daughter and his grandchildren.  After all, there is something invaluable about a safe roof over the head of a sportsman so dashing as Dartie.  Until the events of the last few days he had been almost-supernaturally steady all this year.  The fact was he had acquired a half share in a filly of George Forsyte’s, who had gone irreparably on the turf, to the horror of Roger, now stilled by the grave.  Sleeve-links, by Martyr, out of Shirt-on-fire, by Suspender, was a bay filly, three years old, who for a variety of reasons had never shown her true form.  With half ownership of this hopeful animal, all the idealism latent somewhere in Dartie, as in every other man, had put up its head, and kept him quietly ardent for months past.  When a man has some thing good to live for it is astonishing how sober he becomes; and what Dartie had was really good—­a three to one chance for an autumn handicap, publicly assessed at twenty-five to one.  The old-fashioned heaven was a poor thing beside it, and his shirt was on the daughter of Shirt-on-fire.  But how much more than his shirt depended on this granddaughter of Suspender!  At that roving age of forty-five, trying to Forsytes—­and, though perhaps less distinguishable from any other age, trying even to Darties—­Montague had fixed his current fancy on a dancer.  It was no mean passion, but without money, and a good deal of it, likely to remain a love as airy as her skirts; and Dartie never had any money, subsisting miserably on what he could beg or borrow from Winifred—­a woman of character, who kept him because he was the father of her children, and from a lingering admiration for those now-dying Wardour Street good looks which in their youth had fascinated her.  She, together with anyone else who would lend him anything, and his losses at cards and on the turf (extraordinary how some men make a good thing out of losses!) were his