on the sight of James’ lips.  But Soames bent sideways over the feet, warming them both; they gave him comfort, colder and colder though they grew.  Suddenly he started up; a sound, a dreadful sound such as he had never heard, was coming from his father’s lips, as if an outraged heart had broken with a long moan.  What a strong heart, to have uttered that farewell!  It ceased.  Soames looked into the face.  No motion; no breath!  Dead!  He kissed the brow, turned round and went out of the room.  He ran upstairs to the bedroom, his old bedroom, still kept for him; flung himself face down on the bed, and broke into sobs which he stilled with the pillow....

A little later he went downstairs and passed into the room.  James lay alone, wonderfully calm, free from shadow and anxiety, with the gravity on his ravaged face which underlies great age, the worn fine gravity of old coins.

Soames looked steadily at that face, at the fire, at all the room with windows thrown open to the London night.

“Good-bye!” he whispered, and went out.

CHAPTER XIV

HIS

He had much to see to, that night and all next day.  A telegram at breakfast reassured him about Annette, and he only caught the last train back to Reading, with Emily’s kiss on his forehead and in his ears her words: 

“I don’t know what I should have done without you, my dear boy.”

He reached his house at midnight.  The weather had changed, was mild again, as though, having finished its work and sent a Forsyte to his last account, it could relax.  A second telegram, received at dinner-time, had confirmed the good news of Annette, and, instead of going in, Soames passed down through the garden in the moonlight to his houseboat.  He could sleep there quite well.  Bitterly tired, he lay down on the sofa in his fur coat and fell asleep.  He woke soon after dawn and went on deck.  He stood against the rail, looking west where the river swept round in a wide curve under the woods.  In Soames, appreciation of natural beauty was curiously like that of his farmer ancestors, a sense of grievance if it wasn’t there, sharpened, no doubt, and civilised, by his researches among landscape painting.  But dawn has power to fertilise the most matter-of-fact vision, and he was stirred.  It was another world from the river he knew, under that remote cool light; a world into which man had not entered, an unreal world, like some strange shore sighted by discovery.  Its colour was not the colour of convention, was hardly colour at all; its shapes were brooding yet distinct; its silence stunning; it had no scent.  Why it should move him he could not tell, unless it were that he felt so alone in it, bare of all relationship and all possessions.  Into such a world his father might be voyaging, for all resemblance it had to the world he had left.  And Soames took refuge from