“The little wretch,” murmured Winifred.  “She tried to take me in about that.  What shall you do, Soames?”

“Be guided by events.”

They moved on, silent, in the almost solid crowd.

“Really,” said Winifred suddenly; “it almost seems like Fate.  Only that’s so old-fashioned.  Look! there are George and Eustace!”

George Forsyte’s lofty bulk had halted before them.

“Hallo, Soames!” he said.  “Just met Profond and your wife.  You’ll catch ’em if you put on pace.  Did you ever go to see old Timothy?”

Soames nodded, and the streams forced them apart.

“I always liked old George,” said Winifred.  “He’s so droll.”

“I never did,” said Soames.  “Where’s your seat?  I shall go to mine.  Fleur may be back there.”

Having seen Winifred to her seat, he regained his own, conscious of small, white, distant figures running, the click of the bat, the cheers and counter-cheers.  No Fleur, and no Annette!  You could expect nothing of women nowadays!  They had the vote.  They were “emancipated,” and much good it was doing them!  So Winifred would go back, would she, and put up with Dartie all over again?  To have the past once more—­to be sitting here as he had sat in ’83 and ’84, before he was certain that his marriage with Irene had gone all wrong, before her antagonism had become so glaring that with the best will in the world he could not overlook it.  The sight of her with that fellow had brought all memory back.  Even now he could not understand why she had been so impracticable.  She could love other men; she had it in her!  To himself, the one person she ought to have loved, she had chosen to refuse her heart.  It seemed to him, fantastically, as he looked back, that all this modern relaxation of marriage—­though its forms and laws were the same as when he married her—­that all this modern looseness had come out of her revolt; it seemed to him, fantastically, that she had started it, till all decent ownership of anything had gone, or was on the point of going.  All came from her!  And now—­a pretty state of things!  Homes!  How could you have them without mutual ownership?  Not that he had ever had a real home!  But had that been his fault?  He had done his best.  And his rewards were—­those two sitting in that Stand, and this affair of Fleur’s!

And overcome by loneliness he thought:  ’Shan’t wait any longer!  They must find their own way back to the hotel—­if they mean to come!’ Hailing a cab outside the ground, he said: 

“Drive me to the Bayswater Road.”  His old aunts had never failed him.  To them he had meant an ever-welcome visitor.  Though they were gone, there, still, was Timothy!

Smither was standing in the open doorway.

“Mr. Soames!  I was just taking the air.  Cook will be so pleased.”

“How is Mr. Timothy?”