Page:Sorrell and Son - Deeping - 1926.djvu/340

 "I dare say she does. Same sort of croquet mallet. And she used to cheat like blazes."

"Be careful. I know her."

"Do you?" said Kit, and he felt a desire to be told what Miss Pentreath had grown into, but Cherry did not tell him. She had duties to a rather dull little man on her right who wrote very serious books on ethnology, and brought his own bread with him when he went out to dine. Kit had heard him saying "No sugar, please, no sugar," and Kit thought that he looked like it. To Cherry he was something of a saccharine responsibility.

Some two weeks later Mrs. Roland met Molly Pentreath at the Minerva Club. It was the occasion of one of the Minerva guest nights when the members collected a selection of male celebrities and poked fun at them. Molly and Cherry Roland happened on each other in the smoking-room. The speeches had been very boring; the fish had shown themselves shy.

"Hallo. I had someone dining with me the other night who used to know you."

"Who's that?"

"Christopher Sorrell."

Molly looked straight and hard into Cherry's eyes.

"Oh, old Kit-bag! I hear about him occasionally from my brother. An appendix-snatcher, isn't he?"

"We are rather fond of Kit. He told me that he had read your 'Broken Pottery.

"Poor lad!"

"Yes. He said that he thought that it was a beastly book."

Miss Molly Pentreath laughed.

Kit, being of a wholesomeness that needs exercise and cannot live to the top of its bent without it, took to fencing, and became a member of the Foil Club. Also he walked, varying his objectives or terminal pylons, and the chief of them were Kensington Palace, the Roman Catholic cathedral at Westminster and the northern boundary of Regent's Park. He had walked through this park on one of those bland March days when the virago month becomes treacherously