is little enough."

To himself, however, he had said: 'But he won't take to it. I give him
four years. Still, it's healthy, and harmless.'

After turning the matter over and consulting with Irene, he wrote to his
daughter, Mrs. Val Dartie, asking if they knew of a farmer near them on
the Downs who would take Jon as an apprentice. Holly's answer had been
enthusiastic. There was an excellent man quite close; she and Val would
love Jon to live with them.

The boy was due to go to-morrow.

Sipping weak tea with lemon in it, Jolyon gazed through the leaves of
the old oak-tree at that view which had appeared to him desirable for
thirty-two years. The tree beneath which he sat seemed not a day
older! So young, the little leaves of brownish gold; so old, the
whitey-grey-green of its thick rough trunk. A tree of memories, which
would live on hundreds of years yet, unless some barbarian cut it
down--would see old England out at the pace things were going! He
remembered a night three years before, when, looking from his window,
with his arm close round Irene, he had watched a German aeroplane
hovering, it seemed, right over the old tree. Next day they had found a
bomb hole in a field on Gage's farm. That was before he knew that he
was under sentence of death. He could almost have wished the bomb had
finished him. It would have saved a lot of hanging about, many hours
of cold fear in the pit of his stomach. He had counted on living to the
normal Forsyte age of eighty-five or more, when Irene would be seventy.
As it was, she would miss him. Still there was Jon, more important in
her life than himself; Jon, who adored his mother.

Under that tree, where old Jolyon--waiting for Irene to come to him
across the lawn--had breathed his last, Jolyon wondered, whimsically,
whether, having put everything in such perfect order, he had not better
close his own eyes and drift away. There was something undignified in o
parasitically clinging on to the effortless close of a life wherein
he regretted two things only--the long division between his father and
himself when he was young, and the lateness of his union o with Irene.

From where he sat he could see a cluster of apple-trees in blossom.
Nothing in Nature moved him so much as fruit-trees in blossom; and
his heart ached suddenly because he might never see them flower again.
Spring! Decidedly no man ought to have to die while his heart was
still young enough to love beauty! Blackbirds