He remembered a night three years before, when, looking from his window, with his arm close round Irene, he had watched a German aeroplane hovering, it seemed, right over the old tree.  Next day they had found a bomb hole in a field on Gage’s farm.  That was before he knew that he was under sentence of death.  He could almost have wished the bomb had finished him.  It would have saved a lot of hanging about, many hours of cold fear in the pit of his stomach.  He had counted on living to the normal Forsyte age of eighty-five or more, when Irene would be seventy.  As it was, she would miss him.  Still there was Jon, more important in her life than himself; Jon, who adored his mother.

Under that tree, where old Jolyon—­waiting for Irene to come to him across the lawn—­had breathed his last, Jolyon wondered, whimsically, whether, having put everything in such perfect order, he had not better close his own eyes and drift away.  There was something undignified in o parasitically clinging on to the effortless close of a life wherein he regretted two things only—­the long division between his father and himself when he was young, and the lateness of his union o with Irene.

From where he sat he could see a cluster of apple-trees in blossom.  Nothing in Nature moved him so much as fruit-trees in blossom; and his heart ached suddenly because he might never see them flower again.  Spring!  Decidedly no man ought to have to die while his heart was still young enough to love beauty!  Blackbirds sang recklessly in the shrubbery, swallows were flying high, the leaves above him glistened; and over the fields was every imaginable tint of early foliage, burnished by the level sunlight, away to where the distant “smoke-bush” blue was trailed along the horizon.  Irene’s flowers in their narrow beds had startling individuality that evening, little deep assertions of gay life.  Only Chinese and Japanese painters, and perhaps Leonardo, had known how to get that startling little ego into each painted flower, and bird, and beast—­the ego, yet the sense of species, the universality of life as well.  They were the fellows!  ‘I’ve made nothing that will live!’ thought Jolyon; ’I’ve been an amateur—­a mere lover, not a creator.  Still, I shall leave Jon behind me when I go.’  What luck that the boy had not been caught by that ghastly war!  He might so easily have been killed, like poor Jolly twenty years ago out in the Transvaal.  Jon would do something some day—­if the Age didn’t spoil him—­an imaginative chap!  His whim to take up farming was but a bit of sentiment, and about as likely to last.  And just then he saw them coming up the field:  Irene and the boy; walking from the station, with their arms linked.  And getting up, he strolled down through the new rose garden to meet them....

Irene came into his room that night and sat down by the window.  She sat there without speaking till he said: 

“What is it, my love?”