"What puzzled me—pater—was why you had not talked about it in your letter.
"She asked me to dinner, but I said that I had to dine in hall, and when she asked me to go in after dinner, I said I had to read. "It made me feel queer and churlish, but the fact is I was pretty well astonished. She seemed like a stranger.
"I asked her whether you knew about her coming here, and she did not give me a straight answer.
"It seems pretty beastly writing like this,—but I have always told you things. There is something in me that can't call her mother. I can't help."
Sorrell laid the letter on his desk, and he remained for a long while, deep in thought. Christopher had asked him a very definite question, and he neither wished nor was able to avoid replying to it. That his mood had its moments of exultation was neither here nor there. Almost, he was ready to forgive the woman her attempt to raid his life's store of treasure, for the sake of the significant ineptitude of the attempt. At first, Sorrell had been angry, but Kit's letter had dispersed his anger.
His son was loyal to him, and to explain this loyalty the father could produce a dozen reasons. And was not the chief reason to be found in his own attitude towards Christopher, an attitude of deep and unselfish affection? He had refused to treat the boy like personal property, jealously, with arbitrary patronage. He had fought the spirit of the old-man father. He had never talked down to Christopher, coerced him against his reason, or worked off upon the boy a facile pomposity.
They were friends. This letter was the most signal proof of it.
Kit read his father's letter while he was eating his breakfast. It was a strange and rare letter for a father to write to a son.
"Kit,—I am not only your father but your friend,—and my wish has been to put the friend before the father.
"Old chap,—you mean a very great deal to me, more perhaps than you will ever know, but you are not my cake to have and eat. Your life is your own, and my share in it is the love and pride that will come to me out of it. All the things that will make you happy are
