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 lie! 
For now we grope for hands where no hands are,
And, deathless, still we cry,
Nor hope for a reply.

You promised harvest and a perfect yield. 
You promised true, for on the harvest morn,
Behold a reaper strode across the field,
And man of woman born
Was gathered in as corn.

You promised honour and ordeal by flame. 
You promised true.  In joy we trembled lest
We should be found unworthy when it came;
But—­oh—­we never guessed
The fury of the test.

You promised friends and songs and festivals. 
You promised true.  Our friends, who still are young,
Assemble for their feasting in those halls
Where speaks no human tongue. 
And thus our songs are sung.

I have very rarely found Sunday in London a successful day.  I hate idleness without peace, and festivity without beauty, and noise without music.  I hate to see London people in unnatural clothes.  I hate to see a city holding its breath.

Jay waited ten minutes on the steps of St. Paul’s for Mr. Russell.  This was not because he was late, but because she was early; and this again was not because she was indecently eager, but because she had hit on an unexpectedly non-stop ’bus.  She felt a fool for ten minutes.  And when you have waited ten minutes on those enormous steps under the eye of the pigeons, you will know why she felt a fool.