em, and
it burned away, dripping ash on him, till it dropped from his lips,
at last, which were getting hot. They left him then, and his arms felt
chilly. Three Jolyons in one Jolyon they had walked.

He stood still, counting the sounds--a carriage passing on the highroad,
a distant train, the dog at Gage's farm, the whispering trees, the groom
playing on his penny whistle. A multitude of stars up there--bright and
silent, so far off! No moon as yet! Just enough light to show him the
dark flags and swords of the iris flowers along the terrace edge--his
favourite flower that had the night's own colour on its curving crumpled
petals. He turned round to the house. Big, unlighted, not a soul beside
himself to live in all that part of it. Stark loneliness! He could
not go on living here alone. And yet, so long as there was beauty, why
should a man feel lonely? The answer--as to some idiot's riddle--was:
Because he did. The greater the beauty, the greater the loneliness,
for at the back of beauty was harmony, and at the back of harmony
was--union. Beauty could not comfort if the soul were out of it. The
night, maddeningly lovely, with bloom of grapes on it in starshine, and
the breath of grass and honey coming from it, he could not enjoy, while
she who was to him the life of beauty, its embodiment and essence, was
cut off from him, utterly cut off now, he felt, by honourable decency.

He made a poor fist of sleeping, striving too hard after that
resignation which Forsytes find difficult to reach, bred to their own
way and left so comfortably off by their fathers. But after dawn he
dozed off, and soon was dreaming a strange dream.

He was on a stage with immensely high rich curtains--high as the very
stars--stretching in a semi-circle from footlights to footlights. He
himself was very small, a little black restless figure roaming up and
down; and the odd thing was that he was not altogether himself, but
Soames as well, so that he was not only experiencing but watching. This
figure of himself and Soames was trying to find a way out through the
curtains, which, heavy and dark, kept him in. Several times he had
crossed in front of them before he saw with delight a sudden narrow
rift--a tall chink of beauty the colour of iris flowers, like a glimpse
of Paradise, remote, ineffable. Stepping quickly forward to pass into
it, he found the curtains closing before him. Bitterly disappointed
he--or was it Soames?--moved on, and there w