The time passed quickly for her. The work was easy and interesting, the hours short. Once or twice it occurred to her that her job was simply a disguise for the charity she dreaded, but her hint of this suspicion was received with such pained surprise that, not unwillingly, she banished the idea. Hannassay came and went, always courteous and correct. She grew to like him, for he thought she detected the sentimentalist masquerading in self-defence as the tyrant. After a month she began to consider herself an authority on affairs of State, for Lord Hannassay held a high post in the Home Office. It took her nearly three months more to realise that she knew practically nothing. She was returning from the Home Office one afternoon after delivering some papers when she discovered that she was not as friendless as she had thought, and the discovery was a cheerful surprise. She was walking back along Piccadilly when she nearly collided with a tall young man in a grey flannel suit. He raised his hat absently, apologised, and was about to pass on when suddenly they stopped dead and stared at one another. "Je-rusalem!" exclaimed the young man. He linked his arm in hers in the most natural way in the world, and steered her out of the press towards the portals of the Leroy. "It's just four," he remarked, "and therefore tea-time. I've not seen you for years, Susan--millions of years!" They found a table and sat down on either side of it, inspecting one another. Then they both smiled. "Christopher Arden," she said, "you'll do!" "And you, by Jeremy! Susan, what do you mean by it? I've written you regularly for the last three years, and you haven't answered a line." "I might have," she answered demurely, "if you'd put your address on your letters." His jaw dropped. "Didn't I?" he demanded. "Oh, yes!" She smiled. "You put 'Morocco' and 'South Pacific' and 'Nassau' and that sort of thing. Only I didn't think you were notorious enough for that alone to find you." He grinned. "Sorry!" he apologised. "Tell me all about this and that." She told him, and his brown hand went across the table and touched her fingers lightly. He said nothing--that wouldn't have been Kit Arden, known as Storm wherever soldiers of fortune were gathered together. He hadn't altered. He had always had a manner which mocked the expression of words; and yet his unspoken sympathy meant more to the girl than any amount of fluent condolences. She found his old irresistible spell, that had captured her imagination even when he was a dashing youngster of twenty-four and she a girl of seventeen, as potent as it had always been.