Page:Sorrell and Son - Deeping - 1926.djvu/373



N July Sorrell came to spend a few days with Christopher at No. 107 Welbeck Street.

Sorrell still retained that peculiar sensitiveness towards his son, and on the very first night Kit gave his father an impression of restlessness, of some inward hunger that was unappeased. For, indeed, Kit was restless, chafing under the hair shirt of his obstinate scrupulousness, feeling both a fool and a hero, and looking like neither. He had erected a prodigious and chivalrous fence around the memory of that June night upon the island; he had written one solitary letter to Molly and had received nothing from her but silence. He had not seen her.

But the erecting of fences is very well, provided that you cease to be curious about what is happening on the other side of the fence, and Christopher was curious, most sayagely curious. Obviously, a very attractive young woman need not remain alone, shut up in a garden. There are other adventurous males in the world. And that some other man should seek to possess himself of what might have been his brought Kit such mad restlessness that the cark of it could not be hidden.

His impatience would not let him be. It gathered like blood on the knives he used, and in the wounds he made, a film of blurring restlessness; it seemed to weave itself into his diagnoses; it quivered in his fingers; it kept him awake at night. It would whisper in his ear "You fool, you noble fellow, you scrupulous ass. It is quite true what she said. You are afraid of the old women." Another thing that exasperated him was the fact that he did not know Molly's London address. He had not written to Molly. There was nothing to prevent him going to her club and trying to find out, but he did not go. He was a mass of warring impulses and inhibitions. And there were those tempestuous mo-