a pain there, too."

Swithin reddened, a resemblance to a turkey-cock coming upon his old
face.

"Exercise!" he said. "I take plenty: I never use the lift at the Club."

"I didn't know," James hurried out. "I know nothing about anybody;
nobody tells me anything...."

Swithin fixed him with a stare:

"What do you do for a pain there?"

James brightened.

"I take a compound...."

"How are you, uncle?"

June stood before him, her resolute small face raised from her little
height to his great height, and her hand outheld.

The brightness faded from James's visage.

"How are you?" he said, brooding over her. "So you're going to Wales
to-morrow to visit your young man's aunts? You'll have a lot of rain
there. This isn't real old Worcester." He tapped the bowl. "Now, that
set I gave your mother when she married was the genuine thing."

June shook hands one by one with her three great-uncles, and turned to
Aunt Ann. A very sweet look had come into the old lady's face, she
kissed the girl's check with trembling fervour.

"Well, my dear," she said, "and so you're going for a whole month!"

The girl passed on, and Aunt Ann looked after her slim little figure.
The old lady's round, steel grey eyes, over which a film like a bird's
was beginning to come, followed her wistfully amongst the bustling crowd,
for people were beginning to say good-bye; and her finger-tips, pressing
and pressing against each other, were busy again with the recharging of
her will against that inevitable ultimate departure of her own.

'Yes,' she thought, 'everybody's been most kind; quite a lot of people
come to congratulate her. She ought to be very happy.' Amongst the
throng of people by the door, the well-dressed throng drawn from the
families of lawyers and doctors, from the Stock Exchange, and all the
innumerable avocations of the upper-middle class--there were only some
twenty percent of Forsytes; but to Aunt Ann they seemed all Forsytes--and
certainly there was not much difference--she saw only her own flesh and
blood. It was her world, this family, and she knew no other, had never
perhaps known any other. All their little secrets, illnesses,
engagements, and marriages, how they were getting on, and whether they
were making money--all this was her property, her delight, her life;
beyond this only a vague, shadowy mist of facts and persons of no real
significance. This it was that she would have to lay down when it came