father was still in ‘that rotten Paris.’  He felt that this was emphatically one of those moments for which he had trained himself, assiduously, at school, where he and a boy called Brent had frequently set fire to newspapers and placed them in the centre of their studies to accustom them to coolness in moments of danger.  He did not feel at all cool waiting in the stable-yard, idly stroking the dog Balthasar, who queasy as an old fat monk, and sad in the absence of his master, turned up his face, panting with gratitude for this attention.  It was half an hour before Holly came, flushed and ever so much prettier than she had any right to look.  He saw her look at him quickly—­guiltily of course—­then followed her in, and, taking her arm, conducted her into what had been their grandfather’s study.  The room, not much used now, was still vaguely haunted for them both by a presence with which they associated tenderness, large drooping white moustaches, the scent of cigar smoke, and laughter.  Here Jolly, in the prime of his youth, before he went to school at all, had been wont to wrestle with his grandfather, who even at eighty had an irresistible habit of crooking his leg.  Here Holly, perched on the arm of the great leather chair, had stroked hair curving silvery over an ear into which she would whisper secrets.  Through that window they had all three sallied times without number to cricket on the lawn, and a mysterious game called ‘Wopsy-doozle,’ not to be understood by outsiders, which made old Jolyon very hot.  Here once on a warm night Holly had appeared in her ‘nighty,’ having had a bad dream, to have the clutch of it released.  And here Jolly, having begun the day badly by introducing fizzy magnesia into Mademoiselle Beauce’s new-laid egg, and gone on to worse, had been sent down (in the absence of his father) to the ensuing dialogue: 

“Now, my boy, you mustn’t go on like this.”

“Well, she boxed my ears, Gran, so I only boxed hers, and then she boxed mine again.”

“Strike a lady?  That’ll never do!  Have you begged her pardon?”

“Not yet.”

“Then you must go and do it at once.  Come along.”

“But she began it, Gran; and she had two to my one.”

“My dear, it was an outrageous thing to do.”

“Well, she lost her temper; and I didn’t lose mine.”

“Come along.”

“You come too, then, Gran.”

“Well—­this time only.”

And they had gone hand in hand.

Here—­where the Waverley novels and Byron’s works and Gibbon’s Roman Empire and Humboldt’s Cosmos, and the bronzes on the mantelpiece, and that masterpiece of the oily school, ‘Dutch Fishing-Boats at Sunset,’ were fixed as fate, and for all sign of change old Jolyon might have been sitting there still, with legs crossed, in the arm chair, and domed forehead and deep eyes grave above The Times—­here they came, those two grandchildren.  And Jolly said: