ugged their shoulders and started again.

So the Family set their faces towards the Secret World, with Mr. Russell
as their guide, and the morning sun behind them.

London is a friend whom I can leave knowing without doubt that she will
be the same to me when I return, to-morrow or forty years hence, and
that, if I do not return, she will sing the same song to inheritors of my
happy lot in future generations. Always, whether sleeping or waking, I
shall know that in Spring the sun rides over the silver streets of
Kensington, and that in the Gardens the shorn sheep find very green
pasture. Always the plaited threads of traffic will wind about the reel
of London; always as you go up Regent Street from Pall Mall and look
back, Westminster will rise with you like a dim sun over the horizon of
Whitehall. That dive down Fleet Street and up to the black and white
cliffs of St. Paul's will for ever bring to mind some rumour of romance.
There is always a romance that we leave behind in London, and always
London enlocks that flower for us, and keeps it fresh, so that when we
come back we have our romance again.

Mr. Russell was a lover of London, and that is why he liked his new-found
'bus-conductor. He was an uncalculating sort of man, and he only thought
that he had found a flower in London, a very London flower, and he hoped
that London would show it to him again. He had no instinct either for the
past or the future. He never looked back over the road he had trod,
unless he was obliged to, and he never tried to look forward to the end
of the road he was treading.

Mrs. Gustus, with an iron expression about her chin, kept time to the
beat of Christina's engine with the throbbing of disagreeable thoughts.
There was one thing very plain to her in the matter of Jay--that Jay was
living a life that in a novel is called free, but in a Family--well--you
know what ... Mrs. Gustus knew all about these Friends with capital F's,
Friends with hair flopping over their foreheads, Friends who might drop
stone balls on the Law and still