Page:Sorrell and Son - Deeping - 1926.djvu/178



ORRELL had a few grizzled hairs on his temples, and his eyebrows had grown bushy.

He sat at a desk in the little room where in the early days he had spent so many hours with Thomas Roland's books, and he looked out upon the same garden and the same trees. Everything was the same—and yet different. He saw the sunlight caught in the purple cups of the tulips, the shadows of the trees lying placidly upon the grass, the wallflowers all crimson and gold. Someone was mowing the grass, a figure in a white sweater and grey flannel trousers that went to and fro with an air of lightness as though the twelve-inch mower were a child's toy.

Sorrell had been making entries in a ledger. He was wearing a blue serge suit. A box of cigarettes lay on the desk, and he put down his pen, and lighting a cigarette, leaned back in his chair.

It was Christopher who was pushing that mower to and fro, just for the satisfaction of spending his youth on the job, and with the idea of keeping fit. He had grown and grown amazingly, and this towering up and spreading of the little fellow had never ceased to astonish Sorrell. He had watched the boy changing into the man.

"Strong," he thought,—"I was never as strong as that."

The transfiguration had had its subjective reactions upon the father, for in watching the growth of the boy, Sorrell had seen in him an increasing likeness to the mother. Christopher had inherited Dora Sorrell's fineness of body. She had given him her physical glow, the nice co-ordination of movement, the texture of skin and hair. This likeness worried Sorrell not a little, for though Kit was more his father's son in his mental make-up, the physical resemblance was there, with all its implications.

The entering of a maid with a tea-tray interrupted Sor-