whose broad leaves covered
them from the peaceful glory of the afternoon. A pleasure to sit there
and watch her, and feel that she liked to be with him. And the wish to
increase that liking, if he could, made him go on:

"I expect he showed you a side of him I never saw. He'd be at his best
with you. His ideas of art were a little new--to me "--he had stiffed
the word 'fangled.'

"Yes: but he used to say you had a real sense of beauty." Old Jolyon
thought: 'The devil he did!' but answered with a twinkle: "Well, I have,
or I shouldn't be sitting here with you." She was fascinating when she
smiled with her eyes, like that!

"He thought you had one of those hearts that never grow old. Phil had
real insight."

He was not taken in by this flattery spoken out of the past, out of a
longing to talk of her dead lover--not a bit; and yet it was precious
to hear, because she pleased his eyes and heart which--quite true!--had
never grown old. Was that because--unlike her and her dead lover, he had
never loved to desperation, had always kept his balance, his sense of
symmetry. Well! It had left him power, at eighty-four, to admire beauty.
And he thought, 'If I were a painter or a sculptor! But I'm an old chap.
Make hay while the sun shines.'

A couple with arms entwined crossed on the grass before them, at the
edge of the shadow from their tree. The sunlight fell cruelly on their
pale, squashed, unkempt young faces. "We're an ugly lot!" said old
Jolyon suddenly. "It amazes me to see how--love triumphs over that."

"Love triumphs over everything!"

"The young think so," he muttered.

"Love has no age, no limit, and no death."

With that glow in her pale face, her breast heaving, her eyes so
large and dark and soft, she looked like Venus come to life! But this
extravagance brought instant reaction, and, twinkling, he said: "Well,
if it had limits, we shouldn't be born; for by George! it's got a lot to
put up with."

Then, removing his top hat, he brushed it round with a cuff. The great
clumsy thing heated his forehead; in these days he often got a rush of
blood to the head--his circulation was not what it had been.

She still sat gazing straight before her, and suddenly she murmured:

"It's strange enough that I'm alive."

Those words of Jo's 'Wild and lost' came back to him.

"Ah!" he said: "my son saw you for a moment--that day."

"Was it your son? I heard a voice in the hall; I thought for a second it
was--Phil."