Miss Ford was pouring a grain or two of the magic into her palm.  “How very credulous people are,” she said with a self-conscious smile.  “If Thelma Bennett Watkins were here she would credit this powder with—­”

She stopped, for an astonishing sharp smell filled the Shop.  Almost immediately a curious wheezy sound, punctuated by taps, proceeded from the corner.  It was Mr. Bernard Tovey trying to sing, “Mon coeur s’ouvr’ a ta voix,” and beating time by swinging his heels against the counter on which he sat.

Sarah Brown felt suddenly well.  She trembled but was well.  She jumped off the counter.  “I will run across, if you like,” she said, “and ring up Richard from the ferryman’s house.  He may have left his True Love now.  I am not deaf on the telephone, and the ferryman won’t admit strangers.”

As she left, the smell of magic was getting stronger and stronger.  Mr. Tovey, still impersonating Delilah in the corner, was approaching the more excitable passages of the song.  Miss Ford was saying, “Really, Bernard....”  Sarah Brown felt a slight misgiving.

A warm and rather dramatic-looking light was shining behind the red curtain of the ferryman’s lattice window, as Sarah Brown crossed the moonlit road.  She delighted, after her recent black hours, to think of all those people in the world who were sitting stuffily and pleasantly in little ugly rooms that they loved, doing quiet careful things that pleased them.  And she told herself that the thought of Richard’s little office, alone and alight in the deserted City every night, would comfort her often in the darkness.

The ferryman opened his door, and invited her genially to his telephone.  He had been sitting at his table, surrounded by the snakes that for him took the place of a family.  On the table was a bowl of milk from which a large bull-snake, in a gay Turkey-carpet design, was drinking.  A yellow and black python lay coiled in several figures of eight in the armchair, and an intelligent-looking small dust-coloured snake with a broad nose and an active tongue leaned out of the ferryman’s breast pocket.

“Aren’t they beautiful?” he said, with shy and paternal pride, as Sarah Brown tried to find a place on which the python would like to be tickled or scratched.  Somehow the python has a barren figure, from a caresser’s point of view.  The ferryman went on:  “There is something about the grip and spring in a snake’s body that makes me feel giddy with pleasure.  Snakes to me, you know, are just a drug, sold by the yard instead of in bottles.  My brain is getting every day colder and quieter, and all through loving snakes so.”

Sarah Brown rang up Richard’s office, and the over-refined voice of a young gentleman clerk answered her.

Mr. Higgins was not in the office.

Mr. Higgins had left particular word that if any one wanted him they were to be told that he had—­er—­gone to his True Love.