The retirement from Spion Kop and the absence of any good news from the seat of war imparted an air of reality to all this, clinched in startling fashion by Timothy.  The youngest of the old Forsytes—­scarcely eighty, in fact popularly supposed to resemble their father, ‘Superior Dosset,’ even in his best-known characteristic of drinking Sherry—­had been invisible for so many years that he was almost mythical.  A long generation had elapsed since the risks of a publisher’s business had worked on his nerves at the age of forty, so that he had got out with a mere thirty-five thousand pounds in the world, and started to make his living by careful investment.  Putting by every year, at compound interest, he had doubled his capital in forty years without having once known what it was like to shake in his shoes over money matters.  He was now putting aside some two thousand a year, and, with the care he was taking of himself, expected, so Aunt Hester said, to double his capital again before he died.  What he would do with it then, with his sisters dead and himself dead, was often mockingly queried by free spirits such as Francie, Euphemia, or young Nicholas’ second, Christopher, whose spirit was so free that he had actually said he was going on the stage.  All admitted, however, that this was best known to Timothy himself, and possibly to Soames, who never divulged a secret.

Those few Forsytes who had seen him reported a man of thick and robust appearance, not very tall, with a brown-red complexion, grey hair, and little of the refinement of feature with which most of the Forsytes had been endowed by ‘Superior Dosset’s’ wife, a woman of some beauty and a gentle temperament.  It was known that he had taken surprising interest in the war, sticking flags into a map ever since it began, and there was uneasiness as to what would happen if the English were driven into the sea, when it would be almost impossible for him to put the flags in the right places.  As to his knowledge of family movements or his views about them, little was known, save that Aunt Hester was always declaring that he was very upset.  It was, then, in the nature of a portent when Forsytes, arriving on the Sunday after the evacuation of Spion Kop, became conscious, one after the other, of a presence seated in the only really comfortable armchair, back to the light, concealing the lower part of his face with a large hand, and were greeted by the awed voice of Aunt Hester: 

“Your Uncle Timothy, my dear.”

Timothy’s greeting to them all was somewhat identical; and rather, as it were, passed over by him than expressed: 

“How de do?  How de do?  ‘Xcuse me gettin’ up!”

Francie was present, and Eustace had come in his car; Winifred had brought Imogen, breaking the ice of the restitution proceedings with the warmth of family appreciation at Val’s enlistment; and Marian Tweetyman with the last news of Giles and Jesse.  These with Aunt Juley and Hester, young Nicholas, Euphemia, and—­of all people!—­George, who had come with Eustace in the car, constituted an assembly worthy of the family’s palmiest days.  There was not one chair vacant in the whole of the little drawing-room, and anxiety was felt lest someone else should arrive.