'MY DEAR JO,

'The sum (L500) stands in my books for the benefit of your boy, under the
name of Jolyon Forsyte, and will be duly-credited with interest at 5 per
cent. I hope that you are doing well. My health remains good at
present.

'With love, I am, 'Your affectionate Father,
'JOLYON FORSYTE.'

And every year on the 1st of January he had added a hundred and the
interest. The sum was mounting up--next New Year's Day it would be
fifteen hundred and odd pounds! And it is difficult to say how much
satisfaction he had got out of that yearly transaction. But the
correspondence had ended.

In spite of his love for his son, in spite of an instinct, partly
constitutional, partly the result, as in thousands of his class, of the
continual handling and watching of affairs, prompting him to judge
conduct by results rather than by principle, there was at the bottom of
his heart a sort of uneasiness. His son ought, under the circumstances,
to have gone to the dogs; that law was laid down in all the novels,
sermons, and plays he had ever read, heard, or witnessed.

After receiving the cheque back there seemed to him to be something wrong
somewhere. Why had his son not gone to the dogs? But, then, who could
tell?

He had heard, of course--in fact, he had made it his business to find
out--that Jo lived in St. John's Wood, that he had a little house in
Wistaria Avenue with a garden, and took his wife about with him into
society--a queer sort of society, no doubt--and that they had two
children--the little chap they called Jolly (considering the
circumstances the name struck him as cynical, and old Jolyon both feared
and disliked cynicism), and a girl called Holly, born since the marriage.
Who could tell what his son's circumstances really were? He had
capitalized the income he had inherited from his mother's father
and joined Lloyd's as an underwriter; he painted pictures,
too--water-colours. Old Jolyon knew this, for he had surreptitiously
bought them from time to time, after chancing to see his son's name
signed at the bottom of a representation of the river Thames in a
dealer's window. He thought them bad, and did not hang them because of
the signature; he kept them locked up in a drawer.

In the great opera-house a terrible yearning came on him to see his son.
He remembered the days when he had been wont to slide him, in a brown
holland suit, to and fro under the arch of his legs; the times when he
ran bes