Chloris at that moment introduced drama into the drive by jumping out of the back seat of Christina.  I must, I suppose, admit that Chloris was not Really Quite a Lady.  On the contrary, motor ’buses were the only motors she knew.  She mistook the estimable Christina for a deformed motor ’bus, and when she smelt Victoria Park, she jumped out.  Even for Chloris this was an unsuccessful day.  A flash of yelping lightning caught the tail of Jay’s eye, and she looked round to see her dignified dog, upside down, skid violently down a steep place into the gutter, and there disappear beneath the skirt of a female stranger who was poised upon the kerb.  Unhurt, but probably blushing furiously beneath her fur over her own vulgarity, Chloris was retrieved, and spent the rest of the drive in wiping all traces of the accident off her ribs on to the cushions of Christina.  I am glad that Mr. Russell’s Hound was not there to witness poor Chloris’s unsophisticated confession of caste.

“Where are we going?” asked Jay, when she was calm again.

“God knows where ...” said Mr. Russell.

“I’m always coming across districts of that name,” said Jay severely.  “I often direct my enquiring fares to the region of God Knows Where.  It is most unsatisfying.  Where are we going?”

“On for ever,” said Mr. Russell.  “Out of the world.  To the House by the Sea.”

“Then will you please set me down at Baker’s Arms?” said Jay.  “Do you know, by the way, that Anonyma always says ‘Stay’ to a ’bus, if she remembers in time not to say ‘Hi, stop,’ like a common person.”

She was talking desperately against failure, but it seemed a doomed day, and nothing she could think of seemed worth saying.

“I want to talk to you about your House by the Sea,” said Mr. Russell.  “You know I found it.”

“Don’t tell me any facts,” implored Jay.  “Don’t tell me you pressed half a crown into the palm of the oldest and wisest inhabitant, and found out facts about some nasty young man who was born in seventeen something, and lived in a place called Atlantic View, and wore curls and a choky stock, and fought at Waterloo, and lies in the village church under a stone monstrosity.  Don’t tell me facts, because I know they will bar me for ever out of my House by the Sea.  Facts are contraband there.”

“There is no House by that Sea now,” said Mr. Russell.  “A slate quarry has devoured the headland on which it used to stand.  Where the House used to be there is air now.  I daresay the ghosts you knew still trace out the shape of the House in the air.”

“The ghosts I know,” corrected Jay.  “Don’t put it in the past.”

“It’s all in the past,” said Mr. Russell.  “It’s all a dream, and an echo, and the ghost of the day before yesterday.”

“How do you know?” asked Jay.  “How can you tell it’s not 1916 that’s the ghost?”

She had been taught by her Friend to take very few things for granted, and time least of all.