moved as if mumbling thoughts.  His long legs, thin as a crow’s, in shepherd’s plaid trousers, were bent at less than a right angle, and on one knee a spindly hand moved continually, with fingers wide apart and glistening tapered nails.  Beside him, on a low stool, stood a half-finished glass of negus, bedewed with beads of heat.  There he had been sitting, with intervals for meals, all day.  At eighty-eight he was still organically sound, but suffering terribly from the thought that no one ever told him anything.  It is, indeed, doubtful how he had become aware that Roger was being buried that day, for Emily had kept it from him.  She was always keeping things from him.  Emily was only seventy!  James had a grudge against his wife’s youth.  He felt sometimes that he would never have married her if he had known that she would have so many years before her, when he had so few.  It was not natural.  She would live fifteen or twenty years after he was gone, and might spend a lot of money; she had always had extravagant tastes.  For all he knew she might want to buy one of these motor-cars.  Cicely and Rachel and Imogen and all the young people—­they all rode those bicycles now and went off Goodness knew where.  And now Roger was gone.  He didn’t know—­couldn’t tell!  The family was breaking up.  Soames would know how much his uncle had left.  Curiously he thought of Roger as Soames’ uncle not as his own brother.  Soames!  It was more and more the one solid spot in a vanishing world.  Soames was careful; he was a warm man; but he had no one to leave his money to.  There it was!  He didn’t know!  And there was that fellow Chamberlain!  For James’ political principles had been fixed between ’70 and ’85 when ‘that rascally Radical’ had been the chief thorn in the side of property and he distrusted him to this day in spite of his conversion; he would get the country into a mess and make money go down before he had done with it.  A stormy petrel of a chap!  Where was Soames?  He had gone to the funeral of course which they had tried to keep from him.  He knew that perfectly well; he had seen his son’s trousers.  Roger!  Roger in his coffin!  He remembered how, when they came up from school together from the West, on the box seat of the old Slowflyer in 1824, Roger had got into the ‘boot’ and gone to sleep.  James uttered a thin cackle.  A funny fellow—­Roger—­an original!  He didn’t know!  Younger than himself, and in his coffin!  The family was breaking up.  There was Val going to the university; he never came to see him now.  He would cost a pretty penny up there.  It was an extravagant age.  And all the pretty pennies that his four grandchildren would cost him danced before James’ eyes.  He did not grudge them the money, but he grudged terribly the risk which the spending of that money might bring on them; he grudged the diminution of security.  And now that Cicely had married, she might be having children too.  He didn’t