Page:Sorrell and Son - Deeping - 1926.djvu/237

 across to the Green Park, and over the Mall into St. James's. He stood on the bridge spanning the water and watched the various water-birds. His headache had gone; his stridings of the morning had broken the rhythm of those other stridings to syncopated tunes with a girl pressing close against him.

No. 3, Cheltenham Terrace.

No. 3 was the house in which Lola lived, and he happened to know that he had been walking away from it, and that in spite of the fact that she had said it to music in the approved fox-trot manner. Obviously, she had expected him to keep in step, but Kit's mood was very much out of step with the rapid movements of the previous day.

It wasn't that the young male in him did not desire her. He had gone to bed lying upon roses and thorns, but the Kit of the morning was Sorrell's Kit, the young man who had trained for the May Races, and for that other and greater race, and with the morning his father's grip came back to him.

"I must get out of this," was his abrupt reflection.

He remembered that he had to spend the rest of the day with his mother. His impatience and his disinclination to go back to her were so very strong that they permeated his whole unsciousness, compelling him to recognize in her some natural enemy. He had more than a suspicion that his mother was offering him bribes, the enticements that might be expected to make an appeal to a very young man. She was trying to get at him through his body, and through his more disorderly emotions. Sorrell had never done that.

Kit walked back less rapidly to South Audley Street. It was one o'clock, and he found his mother in the drawing-room, looking far fresher than he felt, and dressed in a shimmery blue dress. She smiled at him, and her smile had a confident roguishness, for Kit's rigidity had disappeared during the last hour at the Halcyon Club.

"You naughty boy!"

She patted the sofa, and the gesture invited him to share it. Moreover, it was borne in upon him that she expected him to kiss her.

"Well, how's Lola this morning?"

She was accusing him of having slipped off to No. 3, Cheltenham Terrace.