Jolyon's attention was chiefly riveted by the look
on her face, which reminded him of his wife. It was as though its owner
had come into contact with forces too strong for her. It troubled him,
arousing vague feelings of attraction and chivalry. Who was she? And
what doing there, alone?

Two young gentlemen of that peculiar breed, at once forward and shy,
found in the Regent's Park, came by on their way to lawn tennis, and he
noted with disapproval their furtive stares of admiration. A loitering
gardener halted to do something unnecessary to a clump of pampas grass;
he, too, wanted an excuse for peeping. A gentleman, old, and, by his
hat, a professor of horticulture, passed three times to scrutinize her
long and stealthily, a queer expression about his lips.

With all these men young Jolyon felt the same vague irritation. She
looked at none of them, yet was he certain that every man who passed
would look at her like that.

Her face was not the face of a sorceress, who in every look holds out to
men the offer of pleasure; it had none of the 'devil's beauty' so highly
prized among the first Forsytes of the land; neither was it of that type,
no less adorable, associated with the box of chocolate; it was not of the
spiritually passionate, or passionately spiritual order, peculiar to
house-decoration and modern poetry; nor did it seem to promise to the
playwright material for the production of the interesting and
neurasthenic figure, who commits suicide in the last act.

In shape and colouring, in its soft persuasive passivity, its sensuous
purity, this woman's face reminded him of Titian's 'Heavenly Love,' a
reproduction of which hung over the sideboard in his dining-room. And
her attraction seemed to be in this soft passivity, in the feeling she
gave that to pressure she must yield.

For what or whom was she waiting, in the silence, with the trees dropping
here and there a leaf, and the thrushes strutting close on grass, touched
with the sparkle of the autumn rime? Then her charming face grew eager,
and, glancing round, with almost a lover's jealousy, young Jolyon saw
Bosinney striding across the grass.

Curiously he watched the meeting, the look in their eyes, the long clasp
of their hands. They sat down close together, linked for all their
outward discretion. He heard the rapid murmur of their talk; but what
they said he could not catch.

He had rowed in the galley himself! He knew the long hours of wa