“Exercise!” he said. “I take plenty: I never use the lift at the Club.”

“I didn’t know,” James hurried out. “I know nothing about anybody; nobody tells me anything....”

Swithin fixed him with a stare:

“What do you do for a pain there?”

James brightened.

“I take a compound....”

“How are you, uncle?”

June stood before him, her resolute small face raised from her little height to his great height, and her handoutheld.

The brightness faded from James’s visage.

“How are you?” he said, brooding over her. “So you’re going to Wales to-morrow to visit your young man’s aunts? You’llhave a lot of rain there. This isn’t real old Worcester.” He tapped the bowl. “Now, that set I gave your mother when shemarried was the genuine thing.”

June shook hands one by one with her three great-uncles, and turned to Aunt Ann. A very sweet look had come into the oldlady’s face, she kissed the girl’s check with trembling fervour.

“Well, my dear,” she said, “and so you’re going for a whole month!”

The girl passed on, and Aunt Ann looked after her slim little figure. The old lady’s round, steel grey eyes, over which afilm like a bird’s was beginning to come, followed her wistfully amongst the bustling crowd, for people were beginning tosay good-bye; and her finger-tips, pressing and pressing against each other, were busy again with the recharging of her willagainst that inevitable ultimate departure of her own.

‘Yes,’ she thought, ‘everybody’s been most kind; quite a lot of people come to congratulate her. She ought to be veryhappy.’ Amongst the throng of people by the door, the well-dressed throng drawn from the families of lawyers and doctors,from the Stock Exchange, and all the innumerable avocations of the upper-middle class — there were only some twenty percentof Forsytes; but to Aunt Ann they seemed all Forsytes — and certainly there was not much difference — she saw only her own