"Let's walk."

They moved westwards. Cleopatra's Needle shot up beside them, a
pointing finger. Down on the silent river below, coffin-like
row-boats lay moored to the wall. Through a break in the trees the
clock over the Houses of Parliament shone for an instant as if
suspended in the sky, then vanished as the trees closed in. A distant
barge in the direction of Battersea wailed and was still. It had a
mournful and foreboding sound. Jill shivered again. It annoyed her
that she could not shake off this quite uncalled-for melancholy, but
it withstood every effort. Why she should have felt that a chapter, a
pleasant chapter, in the book of her life had been closed, she could
not have said, but the feeling lingered.

"Correct me if I am wrong," said Wally Mason, breaking a silence that
had lasted several minutes, "but you seem to me to be freezing in
your tracks. Ever since I came to London I've had a habit of heading
for the Embankment in times of mental stress, but perhaps the middle
of winter is not quite the moment for communing with the night. The
Savoy is handy, if we stop walking away from it. I think we might
celebrate this reunion with a little supper, don't you?"

Jill's depression disappeared magically. Her mercurial temperament
asserted itself.

"Lights!" she said. "Music!"

"And food! To an ethereal person like you that remark may seem gross,
but I had no dinner."