ate, had turned at once upon Irene, and
he had lost no time in giving Aunts Juley and Hester his opinion with
regard to this rumour he heard was going about. No--as he said--she
might want a bit of flirtation--a pretty woman must have her fling; but
more than that he did not believe. Nothing open; she had too much good
sense, too much proper appreciation of what was due to her position, and
to the family! No sc--, he was going to say 'scandal' but the very idea
was so preposterous that he waved his hand as though to say--'but let
that pass!'

Granted that Swithin took a bachelor's view of the situation--still what
indeed was not due to that family in which so many had done so well for
themselves, had attained a certain position? If he had heard in dark,
pessimistic moments the words 'yeomen' and 'very small beer' used in
connection with his origin, did he believe them?

No! he cherished, hugging it pathetically to his bosom the secret theory
that there was something distinguished somewhere in his ancestry.

"Must be," he once said to young Jolyon, before the latter went to
the bad. "Look at us, we've got on! There must be good blood in us
somewhere."

He had been fond of young Jolyon: the boy had been in a good set at
College, had known that old ruffian Sir Charles Fiste's sons--a pretty
rascal one of them had turned out, too; and there was style about
him--it was a thousand pities he had run off with that half-foreign
governess! If he must go off like that why couldn't he have chosen
someone who would have done them credit! And what was he now?--an
underwriter at Lloyd's; they said he even painted pictures--pictures!
Damme! he might have ended as Sir Jolyon Forsyte, Bart., with a seat in
Parliament, and a place in the country!

It was Swithin who, following the impulse which sooner or later urges
thereto some member of every great family, went to the Heralds' Office,
where they assured him that he was undoubtedly of the same family as the
well-known Forsites with an 'i,' whose arms were 'three dexter buckles
on a sable ground gules,' hoping no doubt to get him to take them up.

Swithin, however, did not do this, but having ascertained that the
crest was a 'pheasant proper,' and the motto 'For Forsite,' he had
the pheasant proper placed upon his carriage and the buttons of his
coachman, and both crest and motto on his writing-paper. The arms he
hugged to himself, partly because, not having paid for them, he though