it jealously.  And Jolyon would wonder what the house would look like coated with such age.  Wistaria was already about its walls—­the new look had gone.  Would it hold its own and keep the dignity Bosinney had bestowed on it, or would the giant London have lapped it round and made it into an asylum in the midst of a jerry-built wilderness?  Often, within and without of it, he was persuaded that Bosinney had been moved by the spirit when he built.  He had put his heart into that house, indeed!  It might even become one of the ’homes of England’—­a rare achievement for a house in these degenerate days of building.  And the aesthetic spirit, moving hand in hand with his Forsyte sense of possessive continuity, dwelt with pride and pleasure on his ownership thereof.  There was the smack of reverence and ancestor-worship (if only for one ancestor) in his desire to hand this house down to his son and his son’s son.  His father had loved the house, had loved the view, the grounds, that tree; his last years had been happy there, and no one had lived there before him.  These last eleven years at Robin Hill had formed in Jolyon’s life as a painter, the important period of success.  He was now in the very van of water-colour art, hanging on the line everywhere.  His drawings fetched high prices.  Specialising in that one medium with the tenacity of his breed, he had ’arrived’—­rather late, but not too late for a member of the family which made a point of living for ever.  His art had really deepened and improved.  In conformity with his position he had grown a short fair beard, which was just beginning to grizzle, and hid his Forsyte chin; his brown face had lost the warped expression of his ostracised period—­he looked, if anything, younger.  The loss of his wife in 1894 had been one of those domestic tragedies which turn out in the end for the good of all.  He had, indeed, loved her to the last, for his was an affectionate spirit, but she had become increasingly difficult:  jealous of her step-daughter June, jealous even of her own little daughter Holly, and making ceaseless plaint that he could not love her, ill as she was, and ‘useless to everyone, and better dead.’  He had mourned her sincerely, but his face had looked younger since she died.  If she could only have believed that she made him happy, how much happier would the twenty years of their companionship have been!

June had never really got on well with her who had reprehensibly taken her own mother’s place; and ever since old Jolyon died she had been established in a sort of studio in London.  But she had come back to Robin Hill on her stepmother’s death, and gathered the reins there into her small decided hands.  Jolly was then at Harrow; Holly still learning from Mademoiselle Beauce.  There had been nothing to keep Jolyon at home, and he had removed his grief and his paint-box abroad.  There he had wandered, for the most part in Brittany, and at last had fetched up in Paris.  He had stayed