“Well, my darling, here’s the lady in grey I promised you.”

Holly raised herself and looked up.  He watched the two of them with a twinkle, Irene smiling, Holly beginning with grave inquiry, passing into a shy smile too, and then to something deeper.  She had a sense of beauty, that child—­knew what was what!  He enjoyed the sight of the kiss between them.

“Mrs. Heron, Mam’zelle Beauce.  Well, Mam’zelle—­good sermon?”

For, now that he had not much more time before him, the only part of the service connected with this world absorbed what interest in church remained to him.  Mam’zelle Beauce stretched out a spidery hand clad in a black kid glove—­she had been in the best families—­and the rather sad eyes of her lean yellowish face seemed to ask:  “Are you well-brrred?” Whenever Holly or Jolly did anything unpleasing to her—­a not uncommon occurrence—­she would say to them:  “The little Tayleurs never did that—­they were such well-brrred little children.”  Jolly hated the little Tayleurs; Holly wondered dreadfully how it was she fell so short of them.  ‘A thin rum little soul,’ old Jolyon thought her—­Mam’zelle Beauce.

Luncheon was a successful meal, the mushrooms which he himself had picked in the mushroom house, his chosen strawberries, and another bottle of the Steinberg cabinet filled him with a certain aromatic spirituality, and a conviction that he would have a touch of eczema to-morrow.

After lunch they sat under the oak tree drinking Turkish coffee.  It was no matter of grief to him when Mademoiselle Beauce withdrew to write her Sunday letter to her sister, whose future had been endangered in the past by swallowing a pin—­an event held up daily in warning to the children to eat slowly and digest what they had eaten.  At the foot of the bank, on a carriage rug, Holly and the dog Balthasar teased and loved each other, and in the shade old Jolyon with his legs crossed and his cigar luxuriously savoured, gazed at Irene sitting in the swing.  A light, vaguely swaying, grey figure with a fleck of sunlight here and there upon it, lips just opened, eyes dark and soft under lids a little drooped.  She looked content; surely it did her good to come and see him!  The selfishness of age had not set its proper grip on him, for he could still feel pleasure in the pleasure of others, realising that what he wanted, though much, was not quite all that mattered.

“It’s quiet here,” he said; “you mustn’t come down if you find it dull.  But it’s a pleasure to see you.  My little sweet is the only face which gives me any pleasure, except yours.”

From her smile he knew that she was not beyond liking to be appreciated, and this reassured him.  “That’s not humbug,” he said.  “I never told a woman I admired her when I didn’t.  In fact I don’t know when I’ve told a woman I admired her, except my wife in the old days; and wives are funny.”  He was silent, but resumed abruptly: