or some such place.  For one wild moment the thought had come to Soames:  ‘Why shouldn’t I buy it back?  I meant it for my!’ No sooner come than gone.  Too lugubrious a triumph; with too many humiliating memories for himself and Fleur.  She would never live there after what had happened.  No, the place must go its way to some peer or profiteer.  It had been a bone of contention from the first, the shell of the feud; and with the woman gone, it was an empty shell.  “For Sale or To Let.”  With his mind’s eye he could see that board raised high above the ivied wall which he had built.

He passed through the first of the two rooms in the Gallery.  There was certainly a body of work!  And now that the fellow was dead it did not seem so trivial.  The drawings were pleasing enough, with quite a sense of atmosphere, and something individual in the brush work.  ’His father and my father; he and I; his child and mine!’ thought Soames.  So it had gone on!  And all about that woman!  Softened by the events of the past week, affected by the melancholy beauty of the autumn day, Soames came nearer than he had ever been to realisation of that truth—­passing the understanding of a Forsyte pure—­that the body of Beauty has a spiritual essence, uncapturable save by a devotion which thinks not of self.  After all, he was near that truth in his devotion to his daughter; perhaps that made him understand a little how he had missed the prize.  And there, among the drawings of his kinsman, who had attained to that which he had found beyond his reach, he thought of him and her with a tolerance which surprised him.  But he did not buy a drawing.

Just as he passed the seat of custom on his return to the outer air he met with a contingency which had not been entirely absent from his mind when he went into the Gallery—­Irene, herself, coming in.  So she had not gone yet, and was still paying farewell visits to that fellow’s remains!  He subdued the little involuntary leap of his subconsciousness, the mechanical reaction of his senses to the charm of this once-owned woman, and passed her with averted eyes.  But when he had gone by he could not for the life of him help looking back.  This, then, was finality—­the heat and stress of his life, the madness and the longing thereof, the only defeat he had known, would be over when she faded from his view this time; even such memories had their own queer aching value.

She, too, was looking back.  Suddenly she lifted her gloved hand, her lips smiled faintly, her dark eyes seemed to speak.  It was the turn of Soames to make no answer to that smile and that little farewell wave; he went out into the fashionable street quivering from head to foot.  He knew what she had meant to say:  “Now that I am going for ever out of the reach of you and yours—­forgive me; I wish you well.”  That was the meaning; last sign of that terrible reality—­passing morality, duty, common sense—­her aversion from him who had owned her body, but had never touched her spirit or her heart.  It hurt; yes—­more than if she had kept her mask unmoved, her hand unlifted.