ong moan. What a strong heart, to have uttered that
farewell! It ceased. Soames looked into the face. No motion; no
breath! Dead! He kissed the brow, turned round and went out of the
room. He ran upstairs to the bedroom, his old bedroom, still kept for
him; flung himself face down on the bed, and broke into sobs which he
stilled with the pillow....

A little later he went downstairs and passed into the room. James lay
alone, wonderfully calm, free from shadow and anxiety, with the gravity
on his ravaged face which underlies great age, the worn fine gravity of
old coins.

Soames looked steadily at that face, at the fire, at all the room with
windows thrown open to the London night.

"Good-bye!" he whispered, and went out.

CHAPTER XIV

HIS

He had much to see to, that night and all next day. A telegram at
breakfast reassured him about Annette, and he only caught the last train
back to Reading, with Emily's kiss on his forehead and in his ears her
words:

"I don't know what I should have done without you, my dear boy."

He reached his house at midnight. The weather had changed, was mild
again, as though, having finished its work and sent a Forsyte to his last
account, it could relax. A second telegram, received at dinner-time, had
confirmed the good news of Annette, and, instead of going in, Soames
passed down through the garden in the moonlight to his houseboat. He
could sleep there quite well. Bitterly tired, he lay down on the sofa in
his fur coat and fell asleep. He woke soon after dawn and went on deck.
He stood against the rail, looking west where the river swept round in a
wide curve under the woods. In Soames, appreciation of natural beauty
was curiously like that of his farmer ancestors, a sense of grievance if
it wasn't there, sharpened, no doubt, and civilised, by his researches
among landscape painting. But dawn has power to fertilise the most
matter-of-fact vision, and he was stirred. It was another world from the
river he knew, under that remote cool light; a world into which man had
not entered, an unreal world, like some strange shore sighted by
discovery. Its colour was not the colour of convention, was hardly
colour at all; its shapes were brooding yet distinct; its silence
stunning; it had no scent. Why it should move him he could not tell,
unless it were that he felt so alone in it, bare of all relationship and
all possessions. Into such a world his father might be vo