“This is June’s room,” he said, opening the next door and putting the can down; “I think you’ll find everything.”  And closing the door behind her he went back to his own room.  Brushing his hair with his great ebony brushes, and dabbing his forehead with eau de Cologne, he mused.  She had come so strangely—­a sort of visitation; mysterious, even romantic, as if his desire for company, for beauty, had been fulfilled by whatever it was which fulfilled that sort of thing.  And before the mirror he straightened his still upright figure, passed the brushes over his great white moustache, touched up his eyebrows with eau de Cologne, and rang the bell.

“I forgot to let them know that I have a lady to dinner with me.  Let cook do something extra, and tell Beacon to have the landau and pair at half-past ten to drive her back to Town to-night.  Is Miss Holly asleep?”

The maid thought not.  And old Jolyon, passing down the gallery, stole on tiptoe towards the nursery, and opened the door whose hinges he kept specially oiled that he might slip in and out in the evenings without being heard.

But Holly was asleep, and lay like a miniature Madonna, of that type which the old painters could not tell from Venus, when they had completed her.  Her long dark lashes clung to her cheeks; on her face was perfect peace—­her little arrangements were evidently all right again.  And old Jolyon, in the twilight of the room, stood adoring her!  It was so charming, solemn, and loving—­that little face.  He had more than his share of the blessed capacity of living again in the young.  They were to him his future life—­all of a future life that his fundamental pagan sanity perhaps admitted.  There she was with everything before her, and his blood—­some of it—­in her tiny veins.  There she was, his little companion, to be made as happy as ever he could make her, so that she knew nothing but love.  His heart swelled, and he went out, stilling the sound of his patent-leather boots.  In the corridor an eccentric notion attacked him:  To think that children should come to that which Irene had told him she was helping!  Women who were all, once, little things like this one sleeping there!  ‘I must give her a cheque!’ he mused; ’Can’t bear to think of them!’ They had never borne reflecting on, those poor outcasts; wounding too deeply the core of true refinement hidden under layers of conformity to the sense of property—­wounding too grievously the deepest thing in him—­a love of beauty which could give him, even now, a flutter of the heart, thinking of his evening in the society of a pretty woman.  And he went downstairs, through the swinging doors, to the back regions.  There, in the wine-cellar, was a hock worth at least two pounds a bottle, a Steinberg Cabinet, better than any Johannisberg that ever went down throat; a wine of perfect bouquet, sweet as a nectarine—­nectar indeed!  He got a bottle out, handling it like a baby, and holding it level to the light, to look.