ve uttered that
farewell! It ceased. Soames looked into the face. No motion; no breath!
Dead! He kissed the brow, turned round and went out of the room. He
ran upstairs to the bedroom, his old bedroom, still kept for him; flung
himself face down on the bed, and broke into sobs which he stilled with
the pillow....

A little later he went downstairs and passed into the room. James lay
alone, wonderfully calm, free from shadow and anxiety, with the gravity
on his ravaged face which underlies great age, the worn fine gravity of
old coins.

Soames looked steadily at that face, at the fire, at all the room with
windows thrown open to the London night.

"Good-bye!" he whispered, and went out.

CHAPTER XIV--HIS

He had much to see to, that night and all next day. A telegram at
breakfast reassured him about Annette, and he only caught the last train
back to Reading, with Emily's kiss on his forehead and in his ears her
words:

"I don't know what I should have done without you, my dear boy."

He reached his house at midnight. The weather had changed, was mild
again, as though, having finished its work and sent a Forsyte to
his last account, it could relax. A second telegram, received at
dinner-time, had confirmed the good news of Annette, and, instead of
going in, Soames passed down through the garden in the moonlight to his
houseboat. He could sleep there quite well. Bitterly tired, he lay down
on the sofa in his fur coat and fell asleep. He woke soon after dawn and
went on deck. He stood against the rail, looking west where the river
swept round in a wide curve under the woods. In Soames, appreciation of
natural beauty was curiously like that of his farmer ancestors, a sense
of grievance if it wasn't there, sharpened, no doubt, and civilised, by
his researches among landscape painting. But dawn has power to fertilise
the most matter-of-fact vision, and he was stirred. It was another world
from the river he knew, under that remote cool light; a world into which
man had not entered, an unreal world, like some strange shore sighted
by discovery. Its colour was not the colour of convention, was hardly
colour at all; its shapes were brooding yet distinct; its silence
stunning; it had no scent. Why it should move him he could not tell,
unless it were that he felt so alone in it, bare of all relationship and
all possessions. Into such a world his father might be voyaging, for all
resemblance it had to the world he had l