“Serve him right; he should arrange his affairs better!”

So any respectable Forsyte.  Yet, if that sounder citizen could have listened at the waiting lover’s heart, out there in the fog and the cold, he would have said again:  “Yes, poor devil he’s having a bad time!”

Soames got into his cab, and, with the glass down, crept along Sloane Street, and so along the Brompton Road, and home.  He reached his house at five.

His wife was not in.  She had gone out a quarter of an hour before.  Out at such a time of night, into this terrible fog!  What was the meaning of that?

He sat by the dining-room fire, with the door open, disturbed to the soul, trying to read the evening paper.  A book was no good—­in daily papers alone was any narcotic to such worry as his.  From the customary events recorded in the journal he drew some comfort.  ’Suicide of an actress’—­’Grave indisposition of a Statesman’ (that chronic sufferer)—­’Divorce of an army officer’—­’Fire in a colliery’—­he read them all.  They helped him a little—­prescribed by the greatest of all doctors, our natural taste.

It was nearly seven when he heard her come in.

The incident of the night before had long lost its importance under stress of anxiety at her strange sortie into the fog.  But now that Irene was home, the memory of her broken-hearted sobbing came back to him, and he felt nervous at the thought of facing her.

She was already on the stairs; her grey fur coat hung to her knees, its high collar almost hid her face, she wore a thick veil.

She neither turned to look at him nor spoke.  No ghost or stranger could have passed more silently.

Bilson came to lay dinner, and told him that Mrs. Forsyte was not coming down; she was having the soup in her room.

For once Soames did not ‘change’; it was, perhaps, the first time in his life that he had sat down to dinner with soiled cuffs, and, not even noticing them, he brooded long over his wine.  He sent Bilson to light a fire in his picture-room, and presently went up there himself.

Turning on the gas, he heaved a deep sigh, as though amongst these treasures, the backs of which confronted him in stacks, around the little room, he had found at length his peace of mind.  He went straight up to the greatest treasure of them all, an undoubted Turner, and, carrying it to the easel, turned its face to the light.  There had been a movement in Turners, but he had not been able to make up his mind to part with it.  He stood for a long time, his pale, clean-shaven face poked forward above his stand-up collar, looking at the picture as though he were adding it up; a wistful expression came into his eyes; he found, perhaps, that it came to too little.  He took it down from the easel to put it back against the wall; but, in crossing the room, stopped, for he seemed to hear sobbing.

It was nothing—­only the sort of thing that had been bothering him in the morning.  And soon after, putting the high guard before the blazing fire, he stole downstairs.