Page:Sorrell and Son - Deeping - 1926.djvu/239

 the hard young casket of his reserve. She was the mother fet His almost sullen aloofness had began to hurt er.

They walked up to Leith Hill, and she tried to sentimentalize over the view. She did it badly. Her rising emotion was making her jerky and impulsive.

"It's horrible," she said suddenly, as they were driving back to the Hatch for tea, "we seem like strangers."

Her sudden fierce frankness frightened him. He sat, rigid, looking straight through the glass screen at the road winding between the pines.

"I'm sorry," he said; "but I don't see—how it could be helped."

"O,—Kit!"

She put out a hand and touched a rigid arm.

"I know—I must seem all wrong to you"

Kit's face looked old.

"Well,—you see,—I belong to the pater. He has been such a great pal to me. We—we understand each other"

For a while she said no more.

Christopher never spoke to anyone, not even to his father, of that last emotional scene with his mother. Whenever he thought of it in after years it brought him a sense of flushed discomfort. He would feel himself shut up in that gaudy room with a woman who gradually had lost all self-restraint.

He had felt both scorched and cold, so terribly cold.

He had been so cruelly conscious of the unfairness of it, of her immoderate protestations, her appeals, her attempted caresses. He would remember how she had walked about the room, weeping, pressing a handkerchief to her mouth, looking at him ever and again with a kind of passionate rage.

"Von won't understand. I—always—wanted you. You are my boy."

She had flung herself at him suddenly and seized him, her face red and convulsed.