Robinson; and a doubtful Morland
of a white pony being shod. Deep-red plush curtains, ten high-backed
dark mahogany chairs with deep-red plush seats, a Turkey carpet, and
a mahogany dining-table as large as the room was small, such was an
apartment which Soames could remember unchanged in soul or body since
he was four years old. He looked especially at the two drawings, and
thought: 'I shall buy those at the sale.'

From the dining-room he passed into Timothy's study. He did not remember
ever having been in that room. It was lined from floor to ceiling with
volumes, and he looked at them with curiosity. One wall seemed devoted
to educational books, which Timothy's firm had published two generations
back-sometimes as many as twenty copies of one book. Soames read their
titles and shuddered. The middle wall had precisely the same books as
used to be in the library at his own father's in Park Lane, from which
he deduced the fancy that James and his youngest brother had gone out
together one day and bought a brace of small libraries. The third wall
he approached with more excitement. Here, surely, Timothy's own taste
would be found. It was. The books were dummies. The fourth wall was all
heavily curtained window. And turned toward it was a large chair with a
mahogany reading-stand attached, on which a yellowish and folded copy
of The Times, dated July 6, 1914, the day Timothy first failed to come
down, as if in preparation for the War, seemed waiting for him still.
In a corner stood a large globe of that world never visited by Timothy,
deeply convinced of the unreality of everything but England, and
permanently upset by the sea, on which he had been very sick one Sunday
afternoon in 1836, out of a pleasure boat off the pier at Brighton, with
Juley and Hester, Swithin and Hatty Chessman; all due to Swithin, who
was always taking things into his head, and who, thank goodness, had
been sick too. Soames knew all about it, having heard the tale fifty
times at least from one or other of them. He went up to the globe,
and gave it a spin; it emitted a faint creak and moved about an inch,
bringing into his purview a daddy-long-legs which had died on it in
latitude 44.

'Mausoleum!' he thought. 'George was right!' And he went out and up
the stairs. On the half-landing he stopped before the case of stuffed
humming-birds which had delighted his childhood. They looked not a day
older, suspended on wires above pampas-grass. If the cas