e. Well, Mam'zelle--good sermon?"

For, now that he had not much more time before him, the only part of
the service connected with this world absorbed what interest in church
remained to him. Mam'zelle Beauce stretched out a spidery hand clad in
a black kid glove--she had been in the best families--and the rather sad
eyes of her lean yellowish face seemed to ask: "Are you well-brrred?"
Whenever Holly or Jolly did anything unpleasing to her--a not uncommon
occurrence--she would say to them: "The little Tayleurs never did
that--they were such well-brrred little children." Jolly hated the
little Tayleurs; Holly wondered dreadfully how it was she fell so short
of them. 'A thin rum little soul,' old Jolyon thought her--Mam'zelle
Beauce.

Luncheon was a successful meal, the mushrooms which he himself had
picked in the mushroom house, his chosen strawberries, and another
bottle of the Steinberg cabinet filled him with a certain aromatic
spirituality, and a conviction that he would have a touch of eczema
to-morrow.

After lunch they sat under the oak tree drinking Turkish coffee. It was
no matter of grief to him when Mademoiselle Beauce withdrew to write
her Sunday letter to her sister, whose future had been endangered in
the past by swallowing a pin--an event held up daily in warning to the
children to eat slowly and digest what they had eaten. At the foot of
the bank, on a carriage rug, Holly and the dog Balthasar teased and
loved each other, and in the shade old Jolyon with his legs crossed and
his cigar luxuriously savoured, gazed at Irene sitting in the swing. A
light, vaguely swaying, grey figure with a fleck of sunlight here and
there upon it, lips just opened, eyes dark and soft under lids a little
drooped. She looked content; surely it did her good to come and see him!
The selfishness of age had not set its proper grip on him, for he could
still feel pleasure in the pleasure of others, realising that what he
wanted, though much, was not quite all that mattered.

"It's quiet here," he said; "you mustn't come down if you find it dull.
But it's a pleasure to see you. My little sweet is the only face which
gives me any pleasure, except yours."

From her smile he knew that she was not beyond liking to be appreciated,
and this reassured him. "That's not humbug," he said. "I never told a
woman I admired her when I didn't. In fact I don't know when I've told
a woman I admired her, except my wife in the old days; and wives