Page:Sorrell and Son - Deeping - 1926.djvu/321

 dow, head cocked with an air of critical and impertinent attention.

"Sorry," said Christopher; "I was wondering whether you had last week's Lancet in here."

Pentreath appeared intent upon the splinted wrist.

"On my desk—I think, old chap."

Christopher sought for the Lancet and found it, and then dallied smiling at the child.

"Anything interesting?"

Pentreath glanced up as though he had been hardly aware of Kit's presence.

"A Colles. Care to have a look. We are rather proud of our own pet fracture, aren't we, Gladys?"

The girl simpered, and her father made a scraping' sound with his feet, a sound of potential protest.

Pentreath removed the splints, and Kit stood looking at the girl's wrist, thinking that a man like Maggs would call a child Gladys; and also wondering how he could manipulate an awkward situation. If Pentreath really had? The truth was the truth. And he stood and looked, noting a bumpy prominence on the back of the wrist, and a very slight deflection of the hand.

Then he took the girl's wrist and fingers in his deliberate hands, and Pentreath, who was watching his friend's face, saw an incipient and pleasant smile there.

"Move your hand, old lady. That's it. Now, the fingers."

Kit could have laughed, for the result was fairly satisfactory and the slight apparent deformation more or less normal. Pentreath had worried so furiously that he had become incapable of recording a perfectly scrupulous opinion.

Kit patted the girl's wrist.

"Very nice,—very nice."

Instinct warned him that the father was about to say something. And he did say something, in a little, acid, threatening voice.

"What's that lump there?"

"That? Bone—my friend."

"There wasn't no lump like that before."

"Exactly," said Kit; "and now you are wiser."

"I don't know what you gentlemen think, but it looks all wrong to me."