ly, said it was all very well for people who
never made money to talk. He himself intended to live as long as he
could. This was a hit at George, who was notoriously hard up. Bosinney
muttered abstractedly "Hear, hear!" and, George yawning, the conversation
dropped.

Upon arriving, the coffin was borne into the chapel, and, two by two, the
mourners filed in behind it. This guard of men, all attached to the dead
by the bond of kinship, was an impressive and singular sight in the great
city of London, with its overwhelming diversity of life, its innumerable
vocations, pleasures, duties, its terrible hardness, its terrible call to
individualism.

The family had gathered to triumph over all this, to give a show of
tenacious unity, to illustrate gloriously that law of property underlying
the growth of their tree, by which it had thriven and spread, trunk and
branches, the sap flowing through all, the full growth reached at the
appointed time. The spirit of the old woman lying in her last sleep had
called them to this demonstration. It was her final appeal to that unity
which had been their strength--it was her final triumph that she had died
while the tree was yet whole.

She was spared the watching of the branches jut out beyond the point of
balance. She could not look into the hearts of her followers. The same
law that had worked in her, bringing her up from a tall, straight-backed
slip of a girl to a woman strong and grown, from a woman grown to a woman
old, angular, feeble, almost witchlike, with individuality all sharpened
and sharpened, as all rounding from the world's contact fell off from
her--that same law would work, was working, in the family she had watched
like a mother.

She had seen it young, and growing, she had seen it strong and grown, and
before her old eyes had time or strength to see any more, she died. She
would have tried, and who knows but she might have kept it young and
strong, with her old fingers, her trembling kisses--a little longer;
alas! not even Aunt Ann could fight with Nature.

'Pride comes before a fall!' In accordance with this, the greatest of
Nature's ironies, the Forsyte family had gathered for a last proud
pageant before they fell. Their faces to right and left, in single
lines, were turned for the most part impassively toward the ground,
guardians of their thoughts; but here and there, one looking upward, with
a line between his brows, searched to see some sight on the