Page:Sorrell and Son - Deeping - 1926.djvu/360



ROM that moment Molly Pentreath disappeared. She had let the flat in the Taunton Street house, and inquiries at her club produced no profitable information. Miss Pentreath had not been at her club for a week, nor had she notified the club-porter of any change in her London address. At Chelsea Cherry Roland had no news for Kit. She could only point out to him that Molly had a temperament, and that people who write books have a way of disappearing while they were "with book." But then, of course, there was the bungalow at Marley.

Kit had not forgotten the bungalow on the river, Molly's "Self's Paradise" as she called it. It stood on a small island, away from the shouts of little common children, and on a part of the river where humanity drifted but seldom. "No boatloads of cheap voices, no breezy young men, and jumperish young women. The skylarks over the water meadows,—and in the evening a green twilight."

It was a Saturday in June when Kit took a train to Marley where a blue grey and overcast sky overhung the green valley and the breathless calm of the river. No sunlight in June, but nature went her way, just as Kit went his. Molly's island had a name of its own, and having no notion of its whereabouts, he asked a porter at the station. The Pollards lay a mile or more up the river. You took the lane past Marley Church, and it brought you out on the towing-path within a hundred yards of the island. Or Kit could hire a boat at one of the Marley boat-houses and scull up stream. There was no lock till you reached Hambdon.

Christopher's mood was for walking. He left Marley red and old among its elms and poplars and went westwards into a world of willows and of fields green and secret under a heavy sky. The day had a melancholy, sweet stillness,