The oars of the little boat suddenly wavered and were paralysed.  One of the rowers made a quick movement with his hand.

“It’s the Law,” said the Secret Friend, and he tried spasmodically to extinguish the sun with his hand.  “It’s the Law.  The man with the tall and dewy brow.”

The Law, in a fat officious-looking boat, came sneaking round the near point of the cliff.  The air was so still, and the sea so calm, that you could hear the sides of the boat grate against the cliff.  And the air was so clear that you could see the tall and dewy brow of the Law, as he stood up and discovered the wriggly ladder.

“To have a face like that,” said the Secret Friend, “is to challenge fate.  It makes me sick.”

“What is this?” asked the Law, although there seemed little doubt that the thing was a wriggly ladder.  No one answered; so the Law rowed to the foot of the thing in question.  The Secret Friend jerked it up about six feet, and secured it so.

The Law cleared its throat, and looked nervously at the schooner, and at the sun, and at the other boat, and at the Secret Friend.  The Law likes to be argued with.  Take away words and where is the Law?  Silence always annoys it.

Yet there was no silence in the Secret World.  I remember how the roses sang, and how the sea mourned over the confusion of its gentle dreams.  The knocking of the slow sea upon the cliff seemed like the ticking of the great clock that is our world.  It was a night when every horizon had heaven calling from the other side.

The Story went on....

* * * * *

It was Chloris who brought Jay back to Number Eighteen Mabel Place, Brown Borough.  Chloris gave an unromantic snort and sat with unnecessary clumsiness upon Jay’s toe.  So Jay returned, falling suddenly out of the music of the sea into the band-of-hopeful music of distant Boy Scouts on the march.

Number Eighteen Mabel Place is not, as a rule, a hopeful place to return to.  Jay and I know quite well what Satan felt like when he was expelled from Heaven.

So Jay, whose refuge from most ills was talk, went to see a friend.  She had many friends in the Brown Borough, and most of them were what Mrs. Gustus would call “undeserving.”  Mrs. Gustus has a very high mind; she and the C.O.S. are dreadfully grown-up institutions, I think; they forget what it feels like to have a good rampageous kick against the pricks.  Nearly everybody in the Brown Borough enjoys a kick once a week (on pay-day)—­and some of us go on kicking all our lives.  At any rate, the Brown Borough is peopled with babies young and old, and high minds and grown-up institutions are apt to look over heads.  Jay had a low mind and walked about on the Brown Borough level.

“I have got neuralgia,” said Jay to Chloris, “my hat feels too tight.  My head feels like tete de veau farcie.  I shall go and talk to Mrs.  ’Ero Edwards.”