d for sixty
years. It was painful to Soames to see the chairs his aunts had sat on,
the little grand piano they had practically never played, the books whose
outsides they had gazed at, the china they had dusted, the curtains they
had drawn, the hearth-rug which had warmed their feet; above all, the
beds they had lain and died in--sold to little dealers, and the
housewives of Fulham. And yet--what could one do? Buy them and stick
them in a lumber-room? No; they had to go the way of all flesh and
furniture, and be worn out. But when they put up Aunt Ann's sofa and
were going to knock it down for thirty shillings, he cried out, suddenly:
"Five pounds!" The sensation was considerable, and the sofa his.

When that little sale was over in the fusty saleroom, and those Victorian
ashes scattered, he went out into the misty October sunshine feeling as
if cosiness had died out of the world, and the board "To Let" was up,
indeed. Revolutions on the horizon; Fleur in Spain; no comfort in
Annette; no Timothy's on the Bayswater Road. In the irritable desolation
of his soul he went into the Goupenor Gallery. That chap Jolyon's
watercolours were on view there. He went in to look down his nose at
them--it might give him some faint satisfaction. The news had trickled
through from June to Val's wife, from her to Val, from Val to his mother,
from her to Soames, that the house--the fatal house at Robin Hill--was
for sale, and Irene going to join her boy out in British Columbia, or
some such place. For one wild moment the thought had come to Soames:
'Why shouldn't I buy it back? I meant it for my!' No sooner come than
gone. Too lugubrious a triumph; with too many humiliating memories for
himself and Fleur. She would never live there after what had happened.
No, the place must go its way to some peer or profiteer. It had been a
bone of contention from the first, the shell of the feud; and with the
woman gone, it was an empty shell. "For Sale or To Let." With his
mind's eye he could see that board raised high above the ivied wall which
he had built.

He passed through the first of the two rooms in the Gallery. There was
certainly a body of work! And now that the fellow was dead it did not
seem so trivial. The drawings were pleasing enough, with quite a sense
of atmosphere, and something individual in the brush work. 'His father
and my father; he and I; his child and mine!' thought Soames. So it had
gone on! And all abo