Page:Sorrell and Son - Deeping - 1926.djvu/285

 with it, and was bearing with it in his son. His silence was the silence of sympathy.

Kit pondered it all out.

Why did he not tell his father? He knew that it was possible to tell him. He did not want to tell him, and he had a feeling that his father did not want to be told. It was as though there existed between them tacit agreement to keep the thing like a shaded lamp, and to refuse its ray's penetration into the comradeship they shared as men.

Sorrell had his moments of curiosity. He would wonder about this woman, who she was and what she was, and how much ultimate significance she had for Kit, yet she remained a shadow, a creature divined but unseen, a human planet making itself felt in the emotional firmament And Mary Jewett had the same feelings about Christopher's father, that equally shadowy figure. Kit was very silent about his father, but he let her know that it was not the silence of fear.

"We have always trusted each other, the pater and I."

"And does he know?"

"I think so."

"You haven't told him?"

"No."

For a day or two after those words of Kit's she was more gentle and tender to him, she who was always gentle, smiling out of the deeps of a passionate sadness, for she had a nature that clung. She had the clearness of vision of a woman who is fay. Her love was without hard outlines, though the mouth of it might smile a wounded and foreseeing smile. She gave. She took life as it was, and held it passionately, while looking towards the ultimate shadows. There was something French in the logic of her emotions. This summer by the sea! She asked to forget the mists of November, though she knew that they would come.

Sorrell called her "The Shadow Woman."

It became evident to him that whatever her heritage might be she had no clogging effect on Kit's career or upon his keenness. Samson's hair was uncut, though his eyes were kinder. There was no faltering in his son's stride. He was working for his final, and he went through it with the same long lope, and came down to the Pelican for Christmas, and was glad to be with his father.