she had
seldom before felt so immediately drawn to a strange man. Gone was
the ancient hostility, and in its place a soothing sense of
comradeship. The direct effect of this was to make Jill feel suddenly
old. It was as if some link that joined her to her childhood had been
snapped.

She glanced down the Embankment. Close by, to the left, Waterloo
Bridge loomed up, dark and massive against the steel-grey sky. A
tram-car, full of home-bound travellers, clattered past over rails
that shone with the peculiarly frost-bitten gleam that seems to herald
snow. Across the river everything was dark and mysterious, except for
an occasional lamp-post and the dim illumination of the wharves. It
was a depressing prospect, and the thought crossed her mind that to
the derelicts whose nightly resting-place was a seat on the Embankment
the view must seem even bleaker than it did to herself. She gave a
little shiver. Somehow this sudden severance from the old days had
brought with it a forlornness. She seemed to be standing alone in a
changed world.

"Cold?" said Wally Mason.

"A little."

"Let's walk."

They moved westwards. Cleopatra's Needle shot up beside them, a
pointing finger. Down on the silent river below, coffin-like row-boats
lay moored to the wall. Through a break in the trees the clock over
the Houses of Parliament shone for an instant as if suspended in the
sky, then vanished as the trees closed in. A distant barge in the
direction of Battersea wailed and was still. It had a mournful and
foreboding sound. Jill shivered again. It annoyed her that she could
not shake off this quite uncalled-for melancholy, but it withstood
every effort. Why she should have felt that a chapter, a pleasant
chapter, in the book of her life had been closed, she could not have
said, but the feeling lingered.

"Correct me if I am wrong," said Wally Mason, breaking a silence that
had lasted several minutes, "but you seem to me to be freezing in your
tracks. Ever since I came to London I've had a habit of heading for
the Embankment in times of mental stress, but perhaps the middle of
winter is not quite the moment for communing with the night. The Savoy
is handy, if we stop walking away from it. I think we might celebrate
this re-union with a little supper, don't you?"

Jill's depression disappeared magically. Her mercurial temperament
asserted itself.

"Lights!" she said. "Music!"

"And food! To an ethereal person like you that remark m