Page:Sorrell and Son - Deeping - 1926.djvu/248

 "O,—Kit, I'm a little beast. I'm sorry"

No one witnessed the incident, but Kit had to appear before the family with a palpable bruise on his forehead. He told a white lie about it.

"Silly of me, but I knocked my head against one of the beams in the boat-house."

Molly waylaid him on the stairs that evening.

"You sport!"

She kissed him.

Before going back to Cambridge for the autumn term, Christopher spent a week-end with Thomas Roland in his doll's house at Chelsea.

It was a particularly charming little house, furnished in a style that Roland called "Twentieth Century Queen Anne." The music-room had been formed of two rooms thrown together, and between its two windows stretched a black and polished floor with a vermilion-coloured border. There were two pianos, one in a red lacquer case, the other in one of rosewood stained black.

Roland gave Christopher music, and a new window upon life, a very modern window through which "Cherry of Chelsea" might have stepped with a shingled head and a cretonne frock. That she did appear in that echoing room was another revealing of the world to Kit. She appeared in the person of Iris Gent, the mezzo-soprano who had made "Cherry" famous, and who was teaching the world to laugh to music in Roland's "Blue Box."

Roland caused Christopher to think, and to take a step upwards, one of those hardly perceptible steps that yet bring into view a broader horizon and leave the young man gazing under the impression that it is he who has made the discovery. A few crudities loosened themselves from Kit during that week-end. He was breathing an air of laughing tolerance and breezy humanity, for Roland had cast many skins; the main structure of him was the same, but he had kept his doors and windows open.

For Roland and "Cherry" were lovers. Kit saw and wondered, and out of his wonder grew a new attitude towards