Page:Sorrell and Son - Deeping - 1926.djvu/293

 "The thought that sticks in my throat, pater, is that she wanted to die."

"Perhaps dying is not so difficult, old man."

"Yes,—but. It's as though she had begun to realize that too much love-making bores a man. I was bored. Horrible, isn't it? But not with her, the real Mary, the pal. One seems to get bored with the woman in a woman. And I suppose a woman, a woman like Mary. She shouldn't have cared so much. I did not think people cared so much."

"O,—some of them," said Sorrell, "a few. And yet—she didn't interfere with your work."

"Not a bit. She helped. I think she cured my restlessness, pater. Did you ever feel it?"

"Did I not!"

"I was luckier than poor old Pentreath."

He told his father how he had gone to Mary Jewett's funeral, and met an old mother, one of those women with tired nah puzzled eyes, and how he had lied to her mother.

"I had to, pater. I said that we were to have been married. We weren't."

"Why not?"

"O, we began it—on the understanding. She had an idea that marriage spoiled things. I told her to that I could not marry—for years."

"Did you want to marry?"

"No."

"And she accepted it. I think she treated you rather well, Kit."

"So damned well,—pater,—that I don't feel that I shall find anybody else like her.—Do you know, she would never take a penny from me. Just a few little presents, and things like that. And in London—now! Where the place is packed with hard young wenches who look as though they had been cut out of cardboard. I hate their rouged mouths, and their damned—artificial—up-to-date faces. They are hard, pater, hard."

"Perhaps."

"Mary was gentle. She understood."

"Yes," said Sorrell; "that's the thing that matters, understanding."

Each morning before breakfast Kit and his father rode out into Stoneberry Forest, Sorrell having arranged for a