For nearly three months--week after week--he received these letters, dreamed his dreams and, in writing back to the little old white-haired lady, tried to allay the expectancy of her mind. At last it could be done no longer. You may put back the hands of a clock to your heart’s content, but there is no warding off of the inevitable. There came a letter saying she would write of it no more. It was not impatient, it was not in anger, but in the spirit, as when an old lady lays down her sewing in her lap as the sun sets and, gently tells you, she can see the stitches no longer. It was then, that John, knowing what he had lost, conceived another felonious means of transport--this time the transport of the mind. Jill was only known to his people as Miss Dealtry. They did not know where she lived. They knew nothing of her relations. They could not communicate with her in any way. For a long while he sat looking at that last letter of his mother’s, where she had said she would write no more of Jill. "She wants a love story--bless her heart," he said musingly--and Mrs. Morrell’s sandy cat coming at that moment into the room, he repeated it for the cat’s benefit--"She wants a love story," he said. The cat blinked its eyes, curled a rough red tongue lovingly about its whiskers, and sat down as though, having half an hour to spare and the tortoiseshell not being in the way, it was quite ready to listen to it then. "And, by Jove!" exclaimed John--"She shall have it!" Miss Morrell curled her tail comfortably round her in the most perfect attitude of attention. "I’ll write her a story," said John to Miss Morrell--"a story of beautiful nonsense--some of it true and some of it made up as I go along." And, therewith, he sat himself down to answer her letter. It was necessary, if he were to re-create the interest of the little old white-haired lady, for him to meet Jill again. Accordingly, with some ingenious preamble, in which he explained his silence of the preceding months, he began with the description of his second meeting with Jill in Kensington Gardens--that time when she came and spent the entire morning in telling him that she could not come and meet him that day. "_Undoubtedly God could have made a place more fitted for Romance than Kensington Gardens,_" he began--"_but unquestionably He never did._" And this was how the last tissue of nonsense came to be woven. Of course, he told her, that it was all a secret. Jill had to keep it a secret from her people. He had to do that. Well--surely it was true? He put the question boldly for his conscience to answer, and a look of the real thing came into his eyes. It was as well, however, that he thought of doing it, for the old lady was nearly landing him in an awkward predicament. She enclosed a letter to Jill and asked him to forward it, as, of course, she did not know the address.