“Only sometimes there isn’t any star, and your hands would be ‘outstretched in vain,’ as the song says,” he commented.

“Oh, I hope not!” cried Nan.  “Try to believe they wouldn’t be!”

Mallory uttered a short laugh.

“I’m afraid it’s no case for ‘believing.’  It’s hard fact.”

Nan remained silent.  There was an undertone so bitter in his voice that she felt as though her poor little efforts at consolation were utterly trivial and futile to meet whatever tragedy lay behind the man’s curt speech.  It seemed as though he read her thought, for he turned to her quickly with that charming smile of his.

“You’d make a topping pal,” he said.  And Nan knew that in some indefinable way she had comforted him.

They drove on in silence for some time and when, later on, they began to talk again it was on ordinary commonplace topics, by mutual consent avoiding any by-way that might lead them back to individual matters.  The depths which had been momentarily stirred settled down once more into misleading tranquillity.

In due course they arrived at Abbencombe, and the car purred up to the station, where the Chattertons’ limousine, sent to meet Nan, still waited for her.  The transit from one car to the other was quickly effected, and Peter Mallory stood bareheaded at the door of the limousine.

“Good-bye,” he said.  “And thank you, little pal.  I hope you’ll never find your moon out of reach.”

Nan held out her hand.  In the grey dusk she felt him carry it to his lips.

“Good-bye,” he said once more.

CHAPTER III

A QUESTION OF EXTERNALS

It was a grey November afternoon two days later.  A faint, filmy suggestion of fog hung about the streets, just enough to remind the Londoner of November possibilities, but in the western sky hung a golden sun, and underfoot there was the blessing of dry pavements.

Penelope stood at one of the windows of the flat in Edenhall Mansions, and looked down at the busy thoroughfare below.  Hither and thither men and women hurried about their business; there seemed few indeed nowadays of the leisured loiterers through life.  A tube strike had only recently been brought to a conclusion, and Londoners of all classes were endeavouring to make good the time lost during those days of enforced stagnation.  Unfortunately, time that is lost can never be recovered.  Even Eternity itself can’t give us back the hours which have been flung away.

Rather bitterly Penelope reflected that, in spite of all our vaunted civilisation and education, men still resorted, as did their ancestors of old, to brute force in order to obtain their wishes.  For, after all, a strike, however much you may gloss over the fact, is neither more nor less than a modern substitute for the old-time revolt of men armed with pikes and staves.  That is to say, in either instance you insist on what you want by a process of making other people thoroughly uncomfortable till you get your way—­unless they happen to be stronger than you!  And incidentally a good many innocent folk who have nothing to do with the matter get badly hurt in the fray.