Page:Sorrell and Son - Deeping - 1926.djvu/180

 no signs of wishing to put up the badge of the Red Heart.

"Mr. Roland's not back yet?"

"No."

Kit, eating buttered toast with the air of a young man considering some very serious problem, came out of his silence to suppose that Mr. Roland must be making a great deal of money.

"Here?"

Sorrell was refilling the teapot.

"I was thinking of Cherry of Chelsea. It has been running nine months. Almost as big a hit as Chu Chin Chow."

"He was made to make hits. Some men are. But Roland's not in town."

"That's a jolly nice car of his," said Kit rather irrelevantly, reaching for more toast.

A thrush was singing in one of the trees, and Kit turned a quick head with the swiftness of a young thing whose consciousness is sensitive to colour and to music.

"Hear that,—pater! Cherry,—Cherry, Cherry. That's where Mr. Roland got that song."

He refrained from the buttered toast for half a minute in order to whistle a few bars of the song that was being whistled all over the earth.

Sorrell was thinking of that first night at the "Pelargonium" when he and Kit had sat in the stalls, and watched Roland's comic opera unfold its coloured music. The piece had been an amazing success. It flowed, and laughed, and made love. It was full of a thrush's song on a May morning, and of cherry-coloured bodices, and green petticoats and red shoes. Cherry of Chelsea! And Cherry herself like a piece of exquisite old china. The play had been running for nearly a year, and Cherry's lips were as red as ever. Extraordinary man—Roland!

"The new thing of his ought to hit them,"—and Kit began to whistle a melody—"Blackbird this time. Suppose he's gone off for an inspiration."

"No," said his father gravely, "he has gone to buy an hotel."

Kit fell into another of his reflective moods, consuming