anything to him.
There might be nothing in it. What do you think? She's very artistic,
they tell me. What? Oh, you're a 'regular Juley! Well, I don't know; I
expect the worst. This is what comes of having no children. I knew how
it would be from the first. They never told me they didn't mean to have
any children--nobody tells me anything!"

On his knees by the side of the bed, his eyes open and fixed with worry,
he would breathe into the counterpane. Clad in his nightshirt, his neck
poked forward, his back rounded, he resembled some long white bird.

"Our Father-," he repeated, turning over and over again the thought of
this possible scandal.

Like old Jolyon, he, too, at the bottom of his heart set the blame of the
tragedy down to family interference. What business had that lot--he
began to think of the Stanhope Gate branch, including young Jolyon and
his daughter, as 'that lot'--to introduce a person like this Bosinney
into the family? (He had heard George's soubriquet, 'The Buccaneer,' but
he could make nothing of that--the young man was an architect.)

He began to feel that his brother Jolyon, to whom he had always looked up
and on whose opinion he had relied, was not quite what he had expected.

Not having his eldest brother's force of character, he was more sad than
angry. His great comfort was to go to Winifred's, and take the little
Darties in his carriage over to Kensington Gardens, and there, by the
Round Pond, he could often be seen walking with his eyes fixed anxiously
on little Publius Dartie's sailing-boat, which he had himself freighted
with a penny, as though convinced that it would never again come to
shore; while little Publius--who, James delighted to say, was not a bit
like his father skipping along under his lee, would try to get him to bet
another that it never would, having found that it always did. And James
would make the bet; he always paid--sometimes as many as three or four
pennies in the afternoon, for the game seemed never to pall on little
Publius--and always in paying he said: "Now, that's for your money-box.
Why, you're getting quite a rich man!" The thought of his little
grandson's growing wealth was a real pleasure to him. But little Publius
knew a sweet-shop, and a trick worth two of that.

And they would walk home across the Park, James' figure, with high
shoulders and absorbed and worried face, exercising its tall, lean
protectorship, pathetically unregarded, over