Page:Sorrell and Son - Deeping - 1926.djvu/314

 and arranging to use the waiting-room and one of the consulting-rooms when providence should send him any patients. Sorrell furnished the two rooms for his son, and never had the spending of money given him more pleasure. The rising sun seemed to shine on that little brass plate attached to the green front door.

"Mr. Christopher Sorrell."

Standing one May morning at the open window of Kit's sitting-room, and caressing a grey moustache with a meditative fore-finger, Sorrell looked down into St. Mary's Street and felt that life was good. Kit was arriving. He had his niche in the sacred enclosure; the son of the hotel-porter was one of the elect. The street below him, half in the sunlight and half in the shadow, was as full of the panoply of triumph as any Via Sacra. An itinerant flower-seller was trundling a barrow full of flowers, and Sorrell, the flower lover, felt that his happy mood had a posy. Here and there a car was drawn up outside a house; solid, shimmering cars, blue and black and claret and grey. There was one car that suggested to Sorrell a glass of good red wine. Some day before long Kit would have his car.

The flower-seller's voice was to be heard. He had two or three crimson and white azaleas in pots, also a few polyantha roses. Sorrell leaned out with his hands on the window-sill, caught the flower-seller's eye, and pointed to the door of No. 11.

Christopher was arranging some of his books.

"What are you up to, pater?"

"O,—nothing," said Sorrell. "There's a chap down there with some flowers."

A maid came to say that a man with flowers had come to the front door.

"Tell him I want two of his azaleas, one crimson and one white, and two pots of the carmine roses."

"Yes, sir."

"Ask him what he wants for them, and you can take the money down."

When Sorrell had posed the plants to his liking, and touched them with his fingers, he sat sideways on the window-sill, and watched the street, and Kit, and felt that life was still more good.

"Well,—here you are," he said suddenly.