“But I remember ...” said Mr. Russell.  “Now, did I see it in the paper...?  I remember....  Half a minute, it is coming back.”

“Here’s to-day’s paper,” said Kew, who was getting a little confused.  You will feel the same when you set out to follow the western sun in search of something you know you have left behind you.

Mr. Russell and Christina lingered beside the kerb for quite a minute, and then shrugged their shoulders and started again.

So the Family set their faces towards the Secret World, with Mr. Russell as their guide, and the morning sun behind them.

London is a friend whom I can leave knowing without doubt that she will be the same to me when I return, to-morrow or forty years hence, and that, if I do not return, she will sing the same song to inheritors of my happy lot in future generations.  Always, whether sleeping or waking, I shall know that in Spring the sun rides over the silver streets of Kensington, and that in the Gardens the shorn sheep find very green pasture.  Always the plaited threads of traffic will wind about the reel of London; always as you go up Regent Street from Pall Mall and look back, Westminster will rise with you like a dim sun over the horizon of Whitehall.  That dive down Fleet Street and up to the black and white cliffs of St. Paul’s will for ever bring to mind some rumour of romance.  There is always a romance that we leave behind in London, and always London enlocks that flower for us, and keeps it fresh, so that when we come back we have our romance again.

Mr. Russell was a lover of London, and that is why he liked his new-found ’bus-conductor.  He was an uncalculating sort of man, and he only thought that he had found a flower in London, a very London flower, and he hoped that London would show it to him again.  He had no instinct either for the past or the future.  He never looked back over the road he had trod, unless he was obliged to, and he never tried to look forward to the end of the road he was treading.

Mrs. Gustus, with an iron expression about her chin, kept time to the beat of Christina’s engine with the throbbing of disagreeable thoughts.  There was one thing very plain to her in the matter of Jay—­that Jay was living a life that in a novel is called free, but in a Family—­well—­you know what ...  Mrs. Gustus knew all about these Friends with capital F’s, Friends with hair flopping over their foreheads, Friends who might drop stone balls on the Law and still retain their capital F’s.  She had, in fact, written about them with much daring and freedom.  But one’s young relations may never share the privileges of one’s heroines.  Sympathy with such goings on must be confined to the printed page.

“I will keep these things from the others,” thought Mrs. Gustus.  “They have no suspicions, and if we can find Jay I may be able to save her reputation yet.”