eard. Nor was there ever any necessity for real
heart-to-heart encounters. One could break away into irony--as indeed
he often had to. But the real trouble with June was that she had never
appealed to his aesthetic sense, though she might well have, with
her red-gold hair and her viking-coloured eyes, and that touch of the
Berserker in her spirit. It was very different with Holly, soft and
quiet, shy and affectionate, with a playful imp in her somewhere. He
watched this younger daughter of his through the duckling stage with
extraordinary interest. Would she come out a swan? With her sallow oval
face and her grey wistful eyes and those long dark lashes, she might, or
she might not. Only this last year had he been able to guess. Yes, she
would be a swan--rather a dark one, always a shy one, but an authentic
swan. She was eighteen now, and Mademoiselle Beauce was gone--the
excellent lady had removed, after eleven years haunted by her continuous
reminiscences of the 'well-brrred little Tayleurs,' to another
family whose bosom would now be agitated by her reminiscences of the
'well-brrred little Forsytes.' She had taught Holly to speak French like
herself.

Portraiture was not Jolyon's forte, but he had already drawn his younger
daughter three times, and was drawing her a fourth, on the afternoon
of October 4th, 1899, when a card was brought to him which caused his
eyebrows to go up:

Mr. SOAMES FORSYTE

THE SHELTER, CONNOISSEURS CLUB, MAPLEDURHAM. ST. JAMES'S.

But here the Forsyte Saga must digress again....

To return from a long travel in Spain to a darkened house, to a little
daughter bewildered with tears, to the sight of a loved father lying
peaceful in his last sleep, had never been, was never likely to be,
forgotten by so impressionable and warm-hearted a man as Jolyon. A sense
as of mystery, too, clung to that sad day, and about the end of one
whose life had been so well-ordered, balanced, and above-board. It
seemed incredible that his father could thus have vanished without, as
it were, announcing his intention, without last words to his son, and
due farewells. And those incoherent allusions of little Holly to 'the
lady in grey,' of Mademoiselle Beauce to a Madame Errant (as it sounded)
involved all things in a mist, lifted a little when he read his father's
will and the codicil thereto. It had been his duty as executor of that
will and codicil to inform Irene, wife of his cousin Soames, of her life