equered
apprenticeship weathered with the money of a deeply complaining Roger,
his Forsyte blood was beginning to stand him in good stead in the
profession of owner.

There are moments of disillusionment in the lives of men from which the
sensitive recorder shrinks. Suffice it to say that the good thing fell
down. Sleeve-links finished in the ruck. Dartie's shirt was lost.

Between the passing of these things and the day when Soames turned his
face towards Green Street, what had not happened!

When a man with the constitution of Montague Dartie has exercised
self-control for months from religious motives, and remains unrewarded,
he does not curse God and die, he curses God and lives, to the distress
of his family.

Winifred--a plucky woman, if a little too fashionable--who had borne the
brunt of him for exactly twenty-one years, had never really believed that
he would do what he now did. Like so many wives, she thought she knew
the worst, but she had not yet known him in his forty-fifth year, when
he, like other men, felt that it was now or never. Paying on the 2nd of
October a visit of inspection to her jewel case, she was horrified to
observe that her woman's crown and glory was gone--the pearls which
Montague had given her in '86, when Benedict was born, and which James
had been compelled to pay for in the spring of '87, to save scandal. She
consulted her husband at once. He 'pooh-poohed' the matter. They would
turn up! Nor till she said sharply: "Very well, then, Monty, I shall go
down to Scotland Yard myself," did he consent to take the matter in hand.
Alas! that the steady and resolved continuity of design necessary to the
accomplishment of sweeping operations should be liable to interruption by
drink. That night Dartie returned home without a care in the world or a
particle of reticence. Under normal conditions Winifred would merely
have locked her door and let him sleep it off, but torturing suspense
about her pearls had caused her to wait up for him. Taking a small
revolver from his pocket and holding on to the dining table, he told her
at once that he did not care a cursh whether she lived s'long as she was
quiet; but he himself wash tired o' life. Winifred, holding onto the
other side of the dining table, answered:

"Don't be a clown, Monty. Have you been to Scotland Yard?"

Placing the revolver against his chest, Dartie had pulled the trigger
several times. It was not loaded. Dropping it