senses--never once did the thought of separating from his wife seriously
enter his head....

And the Forsytes! What part did they play in this stage of Soames'
subterranean tragedy?

Truth to say, little or none, for they were at the sea.

From hotels, hydropathics, or lodging-houses, they were bathing daily;
laying in a stock of ozone to last them through the winter.

Each section, in the vineyard of its own choosing, grew and culled and
pressed and bottled the grapes of a pet sea-air.

The end of September began to witness their several returns.

In rude health and small omnibuses, with considerable colour in their
cheeks, they arrived daily from the various termini. The following
morning saw them back at their vocations.

On the next Sunday Timothy's was thronged from lunch till dinner.

Amongst other gossip, too numerous and interesting to relate, Mrs.
Septimus Small mentioned that Soames and Irene had not been away.

It remained for a comparative outsider to supply the next evidence of
interest.

It chanced that one afternoon late in September, Mrs. MacAnder, Winifred
Dartie's greatest friend, taking a constitutional, with young Augustus
Flippard, on her bicycle in Richmond Park, passed Irene and Bosinney
walking from the bracken towards the Sheen Gate.

Perhaps the poor little woman was thirsty, for she had ridden long on a
hard, dry road, and, as all London knows, to ride a bicycle and talk to
young Flippard will try the toughest constitution; or perhaps the sight
of the cool bracken grove, whence 'those two' were coming down, excited
her envy. The cool bracken grove on the top of the hill, with the oak
boughs for roof, where the pigeons were raising an endless wedding hymn,
and the autumn, humming, whispered to the ears of lovers in the fern,
while the deer stole by. The bracken grove of irretrievable delights,
of golden minutes in the long marriage of heaven and earth! The bracken
grove, sacred to stags, to strange tree-stump fauns leaping around the
silver whiteness of a birch-tree nymph at summer dusk.

This lady knew all the Forsytes, and having been at June's 'at home,'
was not at a loss to see with whom she had to deal. Her own marriage,
poor thing, had not been successful, but having had the good sense and
ability to force her husband into pronounced error, she herself had
passed through the necessary divorce proceedings without incurring
censure.

She was therefore a judge of all that sort