Page:Sorrell and Son - Deeping - 1926.djvu/363

 sagacious face, and the little brown chocolate coloured eyes of Oscar Wolffe. A sudden sense of vower had come to him, of staying power, callous and untiring. He felt himself like a block of conscious stone bedded down in the green cushion of the landscape. Unshiftable.

He talked the most platitudinous stuff.

"Quite out of the world here. Where have all the motor boats gone to?"

"Good weather forecast in the paper. People go by opposites. That's the significance of a daily press."

"Low pressure system approaching over the Atlantic."

"Even the office boy is given a chance to talk about isobars."

Kit smiled at Wolffe's formless face. The fellow understood the game; he was something of a sportsman; Kit hit the ball over the net to him and he returned it, and they maintained these interminable rallies. Molly, silent and sunk in a kind of staring, cat-like malevolence, neither moved her head, nor raised an eyelid. She was the net, the inevitable net. An immense weariness seemed to possess her, an apathetic cynicism. The water glided past; so did life; so did men.

About five o'clock Wolffe pulled out a gold watch, and appeared to be making silent calculations. Was there to be any tea? With dry matter-of-factness he informed Christopher that he had to catch the 6.15 train at Marley. "Dining in town, you know. Not much margin." Kit looked at the willows across the river, and felt the mutterings of a coming storm, for Molly had risen and was stretching herself like some feline thing.

"You greedy things shall have tea. It is ready. I have only to boil water."

She paused in the doorway, looking back at them with eyes that seemed preternaturally dark.

"What time is it, Oscar?"

"Two minutes past five."

"If you two leave here at ten minutes to six."

Kit got up, with his hands in his pockets.

"I am staying the night at Marley."

She said nothing; but went into the bungalow, and Christopher strolled down to the water's edge and stood staring at the dark sloth of it, and Oscar Wolffe watched