Page:Sorrell and Son - Deeping - 1926.djvu/238

 "I haven't seen her."

"Lazy young thing. Wasn't she up?"

"I have been walking," said Kit; "in the Park."

"And she didn't turn up? Sly-boots! Well,—you belon to me to-day, my dear, and Lola can wait till to-morrow."

"I have got to be back to-morrow," he said stubbornly, refusing to explain that he had no arrangement with Miss Merrindin, and quite determined not to be over-persuaded.

"My dear, there is no hurry."

"Work,—you know."

She patted the sofa, and half jokingly she began to hint that Sorrell was exercising a fatherly restraint, but Kit did not allow the innuendo to pass. It was necessary for him to make a stand.

"No. The pater and I understand each other. I'm keen on my work."

"But it's the vacation."

"Oh,—I have plenty of reading to do."

She readjusted her attitude. She had seen his young reserve unfold itself on the previous night, but this morning its petals were firmly closed. She realized that she would have to vary the quality of her emotional sunlight, temper it to Kit's peculiarities, play upon his absurd seriousness. She remembered that he had not told her what his future was to be.

"You mean to be so tremendously clever. I want to hear all about it. We will have a nice long drive this afternoon. Leith Hill or somewhere like that. We don't know each other properly yet, Kit, do we?"

He did not tell her that their mutual ignorance was not his fault.

They drove to Leith Hill by way of Leatherhead, Dorking and Abinger, sharing the road with a crowd of flurrying Sabbath cars. Kit kept well in his own corner. Shut up there with this stranger who was his mother, a hopeless and inarticulate self-consciousness possessed him; he resented her attempts to draw him out; he resisted. Failing to make him talk as she wished him to talk, she began to put a touch of pathos into her appeal, nor was her pose the result of mere self-suggestion. She had begun to feel more than she had expected to feel. She wanted Kit, she wanted to possess him and his secret self, all the youth shut up in