Jolyon gazed at her in a stupefaction that was tinged with irony.  So this was the answer to the riddle he had been asking himself; and his three children were Forsytes after all.  Surely Holly might have told him all this before!  But he smothered the sarcastic sayings on his lips.  Tenderness to the young was perhaps the most sacred article of his belief.  He had got, no doubt, what he deserved.  Engaged!  So this was why he had so lost touch with her!  And to young Val Dartie—­nephew of Soames—­in the other camp!  It was all terribly distasteful.  He closed his easel, and set his drawing against the tree.

“Have you told June?”

“Yes; she says she’ll get me into her cabin somehow.  It’s a single cabin; but one of us could sleep on the floor.  If you consent, she’ll go up now and get permission.”

‘Consent?’ thought Jolyon.  ‘Rather late in the day to ask for that!’ But again he checked himself.

“You’re too young, my dear; they won’t let you.”

“June knows some people that she helped to go to Cape Town.  If they won’t let me nurse yet, I could stay with them and go on training there.  Let me go, Dad!”

Jolyon smiled because he could have cried.

“I never stop anyone from doing anything,” he said.

Holly flung her arms round his neck.

“Oh!  Dad, you are the best in the world.”

‘That means the worst,’ thought Jolyon.  If he had ever doubted his creed of tolerance he did so then.

“I’m not friendly with Val’s family,” he said, “and I don’t know Val, but Jolly didn’t like him.”

Holly looked at the distance and said: 

“I love him.”

“That settles it,” said Jolyon dryly, then catching the expression on her face, he kissed her, with the thought:  ’Is anything more pathetic than the faith of the young?’ Unless he actually forbade her going it was obvious that he must make the best of it, so he went up to town with June.  Whether due to her persistence, or the fact that the official they saw was an old school friend of Jolyon’s, they obtained permission for Holly to share the single cabin.  He took them to Surbiton station the following evening, and they duly slid away from him, provided with money, invalid foods, and those letters of credit without which Forsytes do not travel.

He drove back to Robin Hill under a brilliant sky to his late dinner, served with an added care by servants trying to show him that they sympathised, eaten with an added scrupulousness to show them that he appreciated their sympathy.  But it was a real relief to get to his cigar on the terrace of flag-stones—­cunningly chosen by young Bosinney for shape and colour—­with night closing in around him, so beautiful a night, hardly whispering in the trees, and smelling so sweet that it made him ache.  The grass was drenched with dew, and he kept to those flagstones, up and down, till presently it began to seem to him that he