remembered a night three years before, when, looking from his window,
with his arm close round Irene, he had watched a German aeroplane
hovering, it seemed, right over the old tree. Next day they had found a
bomb hole in a field on Gage's farm. That was before he knew that he
was under sentence of death. He could almost have wished the bomb had
finished him. It would have saved a lot of hanging about, many hours
of cold fear in the pit of his stomach. He had counted on living to the
normal Forsyte age of eighty-five or more, when Irene would be seventy.
As it was, she would miss him. Still there was Jon, more important in
her life than himself; Jon, who adored his mother.

Under that tree, where old Jolyon--waiting for Irene to come to him
across the lawn--had breathed his last, Jolyon wondered, whimsically,
whether, having put everything in such perfect order, he had not better
close his own eyes and drift away. There was something undignified in o
parasitically clinging on to the effortless close of a life wherein
he regretted two things only--the long division between his father and
himself when he was young, and the lateness of his union o with Irene.

From where he sat he could see a cluster of apple-trees in blossom.
Nothing in Nature moved him so much as fruit-trees in blossom; and
his heart ached suddenly because he might never see them flower again.
Spring! Decidedly no man ought to have to die while his heart was
still young enough to love beauty! Blackbirds sang recklessly in the
shrubbery, swallows were flying high, the leaves above him glistened;
and over the fields was every imaginable tint of early foliage,
burnished by the level sunlight, away to where the distant "smoke-bush"
blue was trailed along the horizon. Irene's flowers in their narrow beds
had startling individuality that evening, little deep assertions of
gay life. Only Chinese and Japanese painters, and perhaps Leonardo, had