Page:Sorrell and Son - Deeping - 1926.djvu/318

 Kit nodded.

"Look here. I had better arrive informally. To-morrow is Saturday. Suppose that I am spending the week-end with you. I can have a look at the girl's wrist—just out of curiosity—so to speak."

Mr. Christopher Sorrell travelled down to Millchester by an afternoon train, and found Pentreath's car waiting for him at the station. Pentreath's suspiciously minded chauffeur met Sorrell without troubling to salute him in any way, and allowed the porter to dispose of Kit's suitcase.

Kit had given the chauffeur a smile, and one quick, discriminating glance. He had learnt to place men and women with a shrewdness shorn of all sentimental illusions. He had observed and handled and smelt them for years in the out-patient departments of St. Martha's. He had seen them cringe and swagger and pretend, and try to hide what it was madness to hide; and he had learnt to tell false faces from true ones, and to know almost by instinct when someone was lying. He had his gallery of "types," and the fellow at the wheel in front of him was a rodent, a nasty, acute little man of the Nosey Parker genus, very self-pleased, with one of those long, intrusive noses, a patch of raddled red on each cheek bone, and bright, insolent, treacherous little eyes.

"All right, my friend," thought Kit.

Pentreath had an old red house with a walled garden behind it in Bishop's Way leading from the Close. A maid opened the white door with its lion-headed brass knocker and took Sorrell's suitcase, the chauffeur not troubling to move from his seat. The maid had had her orders; Dr. Pentreath was out, but would be back for tea, and Mrs. Pentreath was expecting Mr. Sorrell. They crossed the pleasant and softly lit square hall of the house, with a Jacobean oak cupboard very black against one wall, and a gate-legged table with a bowl of roses in the centre of it. The maid opened the door, and at the farther end of a long and beautifully proportioned room Christopher saw a tall girl rising from a chintz-covered sofa ranged sideways to a