n. Since you left Paris I don't think I
have met anyone I could really talk to. Is all well with you and with
your boy? No one knows, I think, that I am here at present.

"Always your friend,
"IRENE."

Irene within three miles of him!--and again in flight! He stood with a
very queer smile on his lips. This was more than he had bargained for!

About noon he set out on foot across Richmond Park, and as he went along,
he thought: 'Richmond Park! By Jove, it suits us Forsytes!' Not that
Forsytes lived there--nobody lived there save royalty, rangers, and the
deer--but in Richmond Park Nature was allowed to go so far and no
further, putting up a brave show of being natural, seeming to say: 'Look
at my instincts--they are almost passions, very nearly out of hand, but
not quite, of course; the very hub of possession is to possess oneself.'
Yes! Richmond Park possessed itself, even on that bright day of June,
with arrowy cuckoos shifting the tree-points of their calls, and the wood
doves announcing high summer.

The Green Hotel, which Jolyon entered at one o'clock, stood nearly
opposite that more famous hostelry, the Crown and Sceptre; it was modest,
highly respectable, never out of cold beef, gooseberry tart, and a
dowager or two, so that a carriage and pair was almost always standing
before the door.

In a room draped in chintz so slippery as to forbid all emotion, Irene
was sitting on a piano stool covered with crewel work, playing 'Hansel
and Gretel' out of an old score. Above her on a wall, not yet
Morris-papered, was a print of the Queen on a pony, amongst deer-hounds,
Scotch. caps, and slain stags; beside her in a pot on the window-sill was
a white and rosy fuchsia. The Victorianism of the room almost talked;
and in her clinging frock Irene seemed to Jolyon like Venus emerging from
the shell of the past century.

"If the proprietor had eyes," he said, "he would show you the door; you
have broken through his decorations." Thus lightly he smothered up an
emotional moment. Having eaten cold beef, pickled walnut, gooseberry
tart, and drunk stone-bottle ginger-beer, they walked into the Park, and
light talk was succeeded by the silence Jolyon had dreaded.

"You haven't told me about Paris," he said at last.

"No. I've been shadowed for a long time; one gets used to that. But then
Soames came. By the little Niobe--the same story; would I go back to
him?"

"Incredible!"

She had spoken without raising he