"Too many of the lads of the village know me over there. This was a
new departure, you see. What the critics in those parts expect from
me is something entitled 'Wow! Wow!' or 'The Girl from Yonkers'. It
would have unsettled their minds to find me breaking out in poetic
drama. They are men of coarse fibre and ribald mind and they would
have been very funny about it. I thought it wiser to come over here
among strangers, little thinking that I should sit in the next seat
to somebody I had known all my life."

"But when did you go to America? And why?"

"I think it must have been four--five--well, quite a number of years
after the hose episode. Probably you didn't observe that I wasn't
still around, but we crept silently out of the neighborhood round
about that time and went to live in London." His tone lost its
lightness momentarily. "My father died, you know, and that sort of
broke things up. He didn't leave any too much money, either.
Apparently we had been living on rather too expansive a scale during
the time I knew you. At any rate, I was more or less up against it
until your father got me a job in an office in New York."

"My father!"

"Yes. It was wonderfully good of him to bother about me. I didn't
suppose he would have known me by sight, and even if he had
remembered me, I shouldn't have imagined that the memory would have
been a pleasant one. But he couldn't have taken more trouble if I had
been a blood-relation."