buses, with considerable colour in their
cheeks, they arrived daily from the various termini. The following
morning saw them back at their vocations.

On the next Sunday Timothy's was thronged from lunch till dinner.

Amongst other gossip, too numerous and interesting to relate, Mrs.
Septimus Small mentioned that Soames and Irene had not been away.

It remained for a comparative outsider to supply the next evidence of
interest.

It chanced that one afternoon late in September, Mrs. MacAnder, Winifred
Dartie's greatest friend, taking a constitutional, with young Augustus
Flippard, on her bicycle in Richmond Park, passed Irene and Bosinney
walking from the bracken towards the Sheen Gate.

Perhaps the poor little woman was thirsty, for she had ridden long on a
hard, dry road, and, as all London knows, to ride a bicycle and talk to
young Flippard will try the toughest constitution; or perhaps the sight
of the cool bracken grove, whence 'those two' were coming down, excited
her envy. The cool bracken grove on the top of the hill, with the oak
boughs for roof, where the pigeons were raising an endless wedding hymn,
and the autumn, humming, whispered to the ears of lovers in the fern,
while the deer stole by. The bracken grove of irretrievable delights, of
golden minutes in the long marriage of heaven and earth! The bracken
grove, sacred to stags, to strange tree-stump fauns leaping around the
silver whiteness of a birch-tree nymph at summer dusk.

This lady knew all the Forsytes, and having been at June's 'at home,' was
not at a loss to see with whom she had to deal. Her own marriage, poor
thing, had not been successful, but having had the good sense and ability
to force her husband into pronounced error, she herself had passed
through the necessary divorce proceedings without incurring censure.

She was therefore a judge of all that sort of thing, and lived in one of
those large buildings, where in small sets of apartments, are gathered
incredible quantities of Forsytes, whose chief recreation out of business
hours is the discussion of each other's affairs.

Poor little woman, perhaps she was thirsty, certainly she was bored, for
Flippard was a wit. To see 'those two' in so unlikely a spot was quite a
merciful 'pick-me-up.'

At the MacAnder, like all London, Time pauses.

This small but remarkable woman merits attention; her all-seeing eye and
shrewd tongue were inscrutably the means of furthering the ends of