ast. His
possessive instinct, subtle, less formal, more elastic since the War,
kept all misgiving underground. As one looks on some American river,
quiet and pleasant, knowing that an alligator perhaps is lying in the mud
with his snout just raised and indistinguishable from a snag of wood--so
Soames looked on the river of his own existence, subconscious of Monsieur
Profond, refusing to see more than the suspicion of his snout. He had at
this epoch in his life practically all he wanted, and was as nearly happy
as his nature would permit. His senses were at rest; his affections
found all the vent they needed in his daughter; his collection was well
known, his money well invested; his health excellent, save for a touch of
liver now and again; he had not yet begun to worry seriously about what
would happen after death, inclining to think that nothing would happen.
He resembled one of his own gilt-edged securities, and to knock the gilt
off by seeing anything he could avoid seeing would be, he felt
instinctively, perverse and retrogressive. Those two crumpled
rose-leaves, Fleur's caprice and Monsieur Profond's snout, would level
away if he lay on them industriously.

That evening Chance, which visits the lives of even the best-invested
Forsytes, put a clue into Fleur's hands. Her father came down to dinner
without a handkerchief, and had occasion to blow his nose.

"I'll get you one, dear," she had said, and ran upstairs. In the sachet
where she sought for it--an old sachet of very faded silk--there were
two compartments: one held handkerchiefs; the other was buttoned, and
contained something flat and hard. By some childish impulse Fleur
unbuttoned it. There was a frame and in it a photograph of herself as a
little girl. She gazed at it, fascinated, as one is by one's own
presentment. It slipped under her fidgeting thumb, and she saw that
another photograph was behind. She pressed her own down further, and
perceived a face, which she seemed to know, of a young woman, very
good-looking, in a very old style of evening dress. Slipping her own
photograph up over it again, she took out a handkerchief and went down.
Only on the stairs did she identify that face. Surely--surely Jon's
mother! The conviction came as a shock. And she stood still in a flurry
of thought. Why, of course! Jon's father had married the woman her
father had wanted to marry, had cheated him out of her, perhaps. Then,
afraid of showing by h