Page:Sorrell and Son - Deeping - 1926.djvu/215

 spread before him its clear, persuasive light, and he knew that the water would be lying very still and black under the willows and the bridges, but he went to his rooms. He threw his cap and gown into one chair, and himself into the other. Through the open window he watched clouds flushing a sky of pale azure.

Presently, he reached for a note-book scribbled full of chemical formulæ, for he had told his mother that he had work to do, and when you had made such a statement it behoved you to be consistent. But what an extraordinary situation was this, that he should be sitting there, mugging chemistry, while his mother waited less than a mile away, the mother whom he had not seen for nine years! Those nine years! Yet, it was those nine years that had inhibited any impulse that might have pushed him towards her. As it was, he shrank from the idea of seeing her again; he fest and self-conscious, awkwardly and obstinately shy of her.

But he could not read. His youth had been too deeply stirred, and his young self challenged, and the carbon and hydrogen molecules were jostled by live thoughts.

Why had not his father mentioned his mother to him in that last letter?

What was the meaning of Sorrell's silence?

Their compact had never yet miscarried. "No secrets." Kit the man was the son of Kit the boy.

"Perhaps it never occurred to him that she would come up here."

Kit's impulse was to sit down and write to his father, and he threw his chemistry notes aside, and got out a writing-pad and his fountain-pen. He sat curled up in the chair with the pad on his knee, full of an immense and questioning seriousness.

Sounds of wild life began in the room below. Three or four live young men had returned with Burgoyne and were letting loose their liveliness. A gramophone began to play, and voices in chorus to ask the whole of the impending night that most vital question—"Why did I kiss that girl?"

"Confound them!" said Kit, frowning in the dusk over his writing-pad and biting the top of his pen.

"Why—O—why," sang the voices.