es with sudden energy, "that there is
enough?"

The faintest movement occurred to Mr. Polteed's shoulders.

"You can risk it," he murmured; "with what we have, and human nature, you
can risk it."

Soames rose. "You will ask for Mr. Linkman. Thanks; don't get up." He
could not bear Mr. Polteed to slide as usual between him and the door.
In the sunlight of Piccadilly he wiped his forehead. This had been the
worst of it--he could stand the strangers better. And he went back into
the City to do what still lay before him.

That evening in Park Lane, watching his father dine, he was overwhelmed
by his old longing for a son--a son, to watch him eat as he went down the
years, to be taken on his knee as James on a time had been wont to take
him; a son of his own begetting, who could understand him because he was
the same flesh and blood--understand, and comfort him, and become more
rich and cultured than himself because he would start even better off.
To get old--like that thin, grey wiry-frail figure sitting there--and be
quite alone with possessions heaping up around him; to take no interest
in anything because it had no future and must pass away from him to hands
and mouths and eyes for whom he cared no jot! No! He would force it
through now, and be free to marry, and have a son to care for him before
he grew to be like the old old man his father, wistfully watching now his
sweetbread, now his son.

In that mood he went up to bed. But, lying warm between those fine linen
sheets of Emily's providing, he was visited by memories and torture.
Visions of Irene, almost the solid feeling of her body, beset him. Why
had he ever been fool enough to see her again, and let this flood back on
him so that it was pain to think of her with that fellow--that stealing
fellow.

CHAPTER VI

A SUMMER DAY

His boy was seldom absent from Jolyon's mind in the days which followed
the first walk with Irene in Richmond Park. No further news had come;
enquiries at the War Office elicited nothing; nor could he expect to hear
from June and Holly for three weeks at least. In these days he felt how
insufficient were his memories of Jolly, and what an amateur of a father
he had been. There was not a single memory in which anger played a part;
not one reconciliation, because there had never been a rupture; nor one
heart-to-heart confidence, not even when Jolly's mother died. Nothing but
half-ironical affection. He had been too afr