oing to be badly bruised. And it had fallen
out just as she had expected. Mr. Pilkington had said his say and
departed, a pitiful figure, a spectacle which should have wrung her
heart. It had not wrung her heart. Except for one fleeting instant
when she was actually saying the fatal words, it had not interfered
with her happiness at all; and already she was beginning to forget
that the incident had ever happened.

And, if the past should have depressed her, the future might have been
expected to depress her even more. There was nothing in it, either
immediate or distant, which could account for her feeling gently
contented. And yet, as she leaned back in her seat, her heart was
dancing in time to the dance-music of Mrs. Peagrim's hired orchestra.
It puzzled Jill.

And then, quite suddenly, yet with no abruptness or sense of
discovery, just as if it were something which she had known all along,
the truth came upon her. It was Wally, the thought of Wally, the
knowledge that Wally existed, that made her happy. He was a solid,
comforting, reassuring fact in a world of doubts and perplexities. She
did not need to be with him to be fortified, it was enough just to
think of him. Present or absent, his personality heartened her like
fine weather or music or a sea-breeze--or like that friendly, soothing
night-light which they used to leave in her nursery when she was
little, to scare away the goblins and see her safely over the road
that led to the gates of the city of dreams.

Suppose there were no Wally...?

Jill gave a sudden gasp, and sat up, tingling. She felt as she had
sometimes felt as a child, when, on the edge of sleep, she had dreamed
that she was stepping off a precipice and had woken, tense and alert,
to find that there was no danger after all. But there was a difference
between that feeling and this. She had woken, but to find that there
was danger. It was as though some inner voice was calling to her to be
careful, to take thought. Suppose there were no Wally?... And why
should there always be Wally? He had said confidently enough that
there would never be another girl.... But there were thousands of
other girls, millions of other girls, and could she suppose that one
of them would not have the sense to snap up a treasure like Wally? A
sense of blank desolation swept over Jill. Her quick imagination,
leaping ahead, had made the vague possibility of a distant future an
accomplished fact. She felt, absurdly, a