1.

　　Jill was hardly aware that he had asked her a question. She wassuffering that momentary sense of unreality which comes to us whenthe years roll away and we are thrown abruptly hack into the days ofour childhood. The logical side of her mind was quite aware thatthere was nothing remarkable in the fact that Wally Mason, who hadbeen to her all these years a boy in an Eton suit, should now presenthimself as a grown man. But for all that the transformation hadsomething of the effect of a conjuring-trick. It was not only thealteration in his appearance that startled her: it was the amazingchange in his personality. Wally Mason had been the _bete noire_ ofher childhood. She had never failed to look back at the episode ofthe garden-hose with the feeling that she had acted well,that--however she might have strayed in those early days from thestraight and narrow path--in that one particular crisis she had donethe right thing. And now she had taken an instant liking for him.

　　Easily as she made friends, she had seldom before felt so immediatelydrawn to a strange man. Gone was the ancient hostility, and in itsplace a soothing sense of comradeship. The direct effect of this wasto make Jill feel suddenly old. It was as if some link that joinedher to her childhood had been snapped.

　　She glanced down the Embankment. Close by, to the left, WaterlooBridge loomed up, dark and massive against the steel-gray sky, Atram-car, full of home-bound travellers, clattered past over railsthat shone with the peculiarly frostbitten gleam that seems to heraldsnow. Across the river, everything was dark and mysterious, exceptfor an occasional lamp-post and the dim illumination of the wharves.

　　It was a depressing prospect, and the thought crossed her mind thatto the derelicts whose nightly resting-place was a seat on theEmbankment the view must seem even bleaker than it did to herself.

　　She gave a little shiver. Somehow this sudden severance from the olddays had brought with it a forlornness. She seemed to be standingalone in a changed world.

　　"Cold?" said Wally Mason.

　　"A little.""Let's walk."They moved westwards. Cleopatra's Needle shot up beside them, apointing finger. Down on the silent river below, coffin-likerow-boats lay moored to the wall. Through a break in the trees theclock over the Houses of Parliament shone for an instant as ifsuspended in the sky, then vanished as the trees closed in. A distantbarge in the direction of Battersea wailed and was still. It had amournful and foreboding sound. Jill shivered again. It annoyed herthat she could not shake off this quite uncalled-for melancholy, butit withstood every effort. Why she should have felt that a chapter, apleasant chapter, in the book of her life had been closed, she couldnot have said, but the feeling lingered.

　　"Correct me if I am wrong," said Wally Mason, breaking a silence thathad lasted several minutes, "but you seem to me to be freezing inyour tracks. Ever since I came to London I've had a habit of headingfor the Embankment in times of mental stress, but perhaps the middleof winter is not quite the moment for communing with the night. TheSavoy is handy, if we stop walking away from it. I think we mightcelebrate this reunion with a little supper, don't you?"Jill's depression disappeared magically. Her mercurial temperamentasserted itself.