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.