thing. And before the mirror he
straightened his still upright figure, passed the brushes over his great
white moustache, touched up his eyebrows with eau de Cologne, and rang
the bell.

"I forgot to let them know that I have a lady to dinner with me. Let
cook do something extra, and tell Beacon to have the landau and pair at
half-past ten to drive her back to Town to-night. Is Miss Holly asleep?"

The maid thought not. And old Jolyon, passing down the gallery, stole
on tiptoe towards the nursery, and opened the door whose hinges he kept
specially oiled that he might slip in and out in the evenings without
being heard.

But Holly was asleep, and lay like a miniature Madonna, of that
type which the old painters could not tell from Venus, when they had
completed her. Her long dark lashes clung to her cheeks; on her face was
perfect peace--her little arrangements were evidently all right again.
And old Jolyon, in the twilight of the room, stood adoring her! It was
so charming, solemn, and loving--that little face. He had more than his
share of the blessed capacity of living again in the young. They were
to him his future life--all of a future life that his fundamental pagan
sanity perhaps admitted. There she was with everything before her, and
his blood--some of it--in her tiny veins. There she was, his little
companion, to be made as happy as ever he could make her, so that she
knew nothing but love. His heart swelled, and he went out, stilling the
sound of his patent-leather boots. In the corridor an eccentric notion
attacked him: To think that children should come to that which Irene had
told him she was helping! Women who were all, once, little things like
this one sleeping there! 'I must give her a cheque!' he mused; 'Can't
bear to think of them!' They had never borne reflecting on, those poor
outcasts; wounding too deeply the core of true refinement hidden under
layers of conformity to the sense of property--wounding too grievously
the deepest thing in him--a love of beauty which could give him, even
now, a flutter of the heart, thinking of his evening in the society of a
pretty woman. And he went downstairs, through the swinging doors, to the
back regions. There, in the wine-cellar, was a hock worth at least two
pounds a bottle, a Steinberg Cabinet, better than any Johannisberg
that ever went down throat; a wine of perfect bouquet, sweet as a
nectarine--nectar indeed! He got a bottle out, handling it like a baby,