Page:Sorrell and Son - Deeping - 1926.djvu/362

 The man in the chair sat up. Kit imagined an ironical wave of the hand.

He saw Molly coming down to the landing stage. She was in green picked out with cerise. She unfastened the dinghy, and sculled across, turning the boat under the northern bank so that she was facing Christopher.

"Do you want to come across!"

"I do."

"Get in."

Her face seemed to him absolutely expressionless, and during the crossing to the island they neither looked at each other nor exchanged a word. Mr. Wolffe was waiting on the landing stage. With intimate and helpful serenity he caught hold of the painter and fastened it to the iron ring.

"You are just about in time. It is going to rain."

Kit landed and watched Molly shipping her sculls.

"Usual June weather," he said.

She emerged lightly, and going straight to the loggia, reseated herself in the same chair. Oscar Wolffe was equally practical. Kit, seeing a third chair leaning folded against the wall, opened it, placed it on Molly's unoccupied flank and sat down.

No one said anything. They sat and stared at the water and the willows, until the one flexible temperament bent under the tension of the silence, and producing a cigar case, opened it.

"Try one."

He leaned across Molly with arm extended.

"Quite mild."

"Thanks."

Kit accepted a cigar neither as a peace offering nor as a challenge. He realized Wolffe's position, and understood it in finding himself one of the three. The fellow had sense, and the easy balance of the worldling, and Kit was aware of the need for balance. The two of them poised with that incorrigible slip of wildness between them! And Christopher was thinking—"Did she come down here to write—or because? And how long has that fellow been here? And did she ask him to come? Anyhow—I'm staying."

He began to talk, and not to the reclining and enigmatic woman in the middle chair, but across her at the sallow and