the robust child-figures of
Imogen and little Publius.

But those Gardens and that Park were not sacred to James. Forsytes and
tramps, children and lovers, rested and wandered day after day, night
after night, seeking one and all some freedom from labour, from the reek
and turmoil of the streets.

The leaves browned slowly, lingering with the sun and summer-like warmth
of the nights.

On Saturday, October 5, the sky that had been blue all day deepened after
sunset to the bloom of purple grapes. There was no moon, and a clear
dark, like some velvety garment, was wrapped around the trees, whose
thinned branches, resembling plumes, stirred not in the still, warm air.
All London had poured into the Park, draining the cup of summer to its
dregs.

Couple after couple, from every gate, they streamed along the paths and
over the burnt grass, and one after another, silently out of the lighted
spaces, stole into the shelter of the feathery trees, where, blotted
against some trunk, or under the shadow of shrubs, they were lost to all
but themselves in the heart of the soft darkness.

To fresh-comers along the paths, these forerunners formed but part of
that passionate dusk, whence only a strange murmur, like the confused
beating of hearts, came forth. But when that murmur reached each couple
in the lamp-light their voices wavered, and ceased; their arms enlaced,
their eyes began seeking, searching, probing the blackness. Suddenly, as
though drawn by invisible hands, they, too, stepped over the railing,
and, silent as shadows, were gone from the light.

The stillness, enclosed in the far, inexorable roar of the town, was
alive with the myriad passions, hopes, and loves of multitudes of
struggling human atoms; for in spite of the disapproval of that great
body of Forsytes, the Municipal Council--to whom Love had long been
considered, next to the Sewage Question, the gravest danger to the
community--a process was going on that night in the Park, and in a
hundred other parks, without which the thousand factories, churches,
shops, taxes, and drains, of which they were custodians, were as arteries
without blood, a man without a heart.

The instincts of self-forgetfulness, of passion, and of love, hiding
under the trees, away from the trustees of their remorseless enemy, the
'sense of property,' were holding a stealthy revel, and Soames, returning
from Bayswater for he had been alone to dine at Timothy's walking home
along t