ew York?" said Jill. "Oh, then you live in America?"

"Yes. I only came over here to see that darned false alarm of a play
of mine put on."

"Why didn't you put it on in New York?"

"Too many of the lads of the village know me over there. This was a
new departure, you see. What the critics in those parts expect from me
is something entitled 'Wow! Wow!' or 'The Girl from Yonkers.' It would
have unsettled their minds to find me breaking out in poetic drama.
They are men of coarse fibre and ribald mind and they would have been
funny about it. I thought it wiser to come over here among strangers,
little thinking that I should sit in the next seat to somebody I had
known all my life."

"But when did you go to America? And why?"

"I think it must have been four--five--well, quite a number of years
after the hose episode. Probably you didn't observe that I wasn't
still around, but we crept silently out of the neighbourhood round
about that time and went to live in London." His tone lost its
lightness momentarily. "My father died, you know, and that sort of
broke things up. He didn't leave any too much money, either.
Apparently we had been living on rather too expensive a scale during
the time I knew you. At any rate, I was more or less up against it
until your father got me a job in an office in New York."

"My father!"

"Yes. It was wonderfully good of him to bother about me. I didn't
suppose he would have known me by sight, and, even if he had
remembered me, I shouldn't have imagined that the memory would have
been a pleasant one. But he couldn't have taken more trouble if I had
been a blood-relation."

"That was just like father," said Jill softly.

"He was a prince."

"But you aren't in the office now?"

"No. I found I had a knack of writing verses and things, and I wrote a
few vaudeville songs. Then I came across a man named Bevan at a music
publisher's. He was just starting to write music, and we got together
and turned out some vaudeville sketches, and then a manager sent for
us to fix up a show that was dying on the road and we had the good
luck to turn it into a success, and after that it was pretty good
going. George Bevan got married the other day. Lucky devil!"

"Are you married?"

"No."

"You were faithful to my memory?" said Jill with a smile.

"I was."

"It can't last," said Jill, shaking her head. "One of these days
you'll meet some lovely American girl and then you'll put a worm down
her