"Could you give me a hypodermic? I have to have it now. Pain;—coming on again."
"My God!" said Kit to his own silent soul.
Simon Orange and Christopher went out into the garden, and when Kit had glanced back at his father's window, he drew his friend through the gate in the hedge to one of the Pelican lawns.
"Well?"
Orange's heavy head hung forward.
"Afraid so. Not much doubt. He must have had it for months."
He did not look at Kit.
"Can anything be done?"
"Old man,—would you?"
"Oh,—I know. Hopeless,—even a palliatory operation. The liver is down to his umbilicus; a cancerous mass."
Orange nodded.
"Nothing but morphia. Will you tell him, or shall I?"
Kit's eyes had a strange blueness.
"I will. I think he knows. He is an extraordinary chap, my father. Never anybody like him, never will be."
That night, for the first time in her life, Christopher Sorrell's wife saw a man's tears.
