aid the old woman. "There is no
explanation. Time does not move. Men move." The noise of the rain seemed
to wash out everything but remembrance, and there was no feeling in Jay
but a terrible longing to have her Secret Friend with her again, and that
long secret childhood of theirs, and to wipe out half her days and all
her knowledge, and to hear once more those songs upon the sands of the
cove, and to feel the tingling ground of the sunny hills.

"My Friend has never forsaken me before," she said.

She felt a hand press her hand, and she met the eyes of little Mrs. Love.

"Yo're a mousey sort of kid," said Mrs. Love, "sittin' there as if you
was in church. Shall we go 'ome? The rine's gettin' worse an' worse, an'
it's no good wytin'. I'll see you 'ome."

When Jay, very wet and dazed, reached Eighteen Mabel Place, she found a
card pushed under the door. The name on it was Mr. Herbert Russell's, and
there was a suggestion in a beautiful little handwriting on the back of
it that she should ring him up next morning and tell him when to come and
see her, as he had a message from her brother.

"This is the sort of thing that couldn't possibly happen in real life,"
said Jay. "I must be drunk after all. On no doorstep except Heaven's
could one find a message so romantic."

She was instinctively disobedient to Older and Wiser people. She never
entertained the idea of telephoning. She could imagine Mr. Russell
answering the telephone in a prosaic voice like a double bass. She wrote
the following letter:

DEAR SIR--Don't you remember, I was to meet you anyway on the steps of
St. Paul's at ten o'clock next Sunday? I will wait till then for the
message.--Yours faithfully,

JANE ELIZABETH MARTIN, 'Bus-conductor.

"That letter ought to put two and two together for him," she thought, "if
he hasn't done it already. It's a complicated little sum, and the result
is--what?"

She felt hot and feverish when she wrote the letter. And directly she had
posted it she regretted having done so.

"I forget what I wrote," she said. "It is dangerous to post letters to
Older and Wiser Men when drunk."

All that night she lay awake and mourned the desertion of her
Secret Friend.

You promised War and Thunder and Romance.
You promised true, but we were very blind,
And very young, and in our ignorance
We never called to mind
That truth is seldom kind.

You promised love, immortal as a star.
You promised true, yet how the truth can li