alteration in his appearance that startled her: it was the amazing
change in his personality. Wally Mason had been the _bete noire_ of
her childhood. She had never failed to look back at the episode of
the garden-hose with the feeling that she had acted well,
that--however she might have strayed in those early days from the
straight and narrow path--in that one particular crisis she had done
the right thing. And now she had taken an instant liking for him.
Easily as she made friends, she had seldom before felt so immediately
drawn to a strange man. Gone was the ancient hostility, and in its
place a soothing sense of comradeship. The direct effect of this was
to make Jill feel suddenly old. It was as if some link that joined
her to her childhood had been snapped.

She glanced down the Embankment. Close by, to the left, Waterloo
Bridge loomed up, dark and massive against the steel-gray sky, A
tram-car, full of home-bound travellers, clattered past over rails
that shone with the peculiarly frostbitten gleam that seems to herald
snow. Across the river, everything was dark and mysterious, except
for an occasional lamp-post and the dim illumination of the wharves.
It was a depressing prospect, and the thought crossed her mind that
to the derelicts whose nightly resting-place was a seat on the
Embankment the view must seem even bleaker than it did to herself.
She gave a little shiver. Somehow this sudden severance from the old
days had brought with it a forlornness. She seemed to be standing
alone in a changed world.

"Cold?" said Wally Mason.

"A little."