beginning to grizzle, and hid his
Forsyte chin; his brown face had lost the warped expression of his
ostracised period--he looked, if anything, younger. The loss of his wife
in 1894 had been one of those domestic tragedies which turn out in the
end for the good of all. He had, indeed, loved her to the last, for his
was an affectionate spirit, but she had become increasingly difficult:
jealous of her step-daughter June, jealous even of her own little
daughter Holly, and making ceaseless plaint that he could not love her,
ill as she was, and 'useless to everyone, and better dead.' He had
mourned her sincerely, but his face had looked younger since she died.
If she could only have believed that she made him happy, how much happier
would the twenty years of their companionship have been!

June had never really got on well with her who had reprehensibly taken
her own mother's place; and ever since old Jolyon died she had been
established in a sort of studio in London. But she had come back to
Robin Hill on her stepmother's death, and gathered the reins there into
her small decided hands. Jolly was then at Harrow; Holly still learning
from Mademoiselle Beauce. There had been nothing to keep Jolyon at home,
and he had removed his grief and his paint-box abroad. There he had
wandered, for the most part in Brittany, and at last had fetched up in
Paris. He had stayed there several months, and come back with the
younger face and the short fair beard. Essentially a man who merely
lodged in any house, it had suited him perfectly that June should reign
at Robin Hill, so that he was free to go off with his easel where and
when he liked. She was inclined, it is true, to regard the house rather
as an asylum for her proteges! but his own outcast days had filled Jolyon
for ever with sympathy towards an outcast, and June's 'lame ducks' about
the place did not annoy him. By all means let her have them down--and
feed them up; and though his slightly cynical humour perceived that they
ministered to his daughter's love of domination as well as moved her warm
heart, he never ceased to admire her for having so many ducks. He fell,
indeed, year by year into a more and more detached and brotherly attitude
towards his own son and daughters, treating them with a sort of whimsical
equality. When he went down to Harrow to see Jolly, he never quite knew
which of them was the elder, and would sit eating cherries with him out
of one paper bag