“Why do you take him for rides in the taxi?” asked Gypsy.
“Why not?” said the Taxi-Man. “Haven’t we always had our nights, him and me? Didn’t we discover London together, bit by bit, under many a full moon? Ah, missy, the fairy-tales we could tell you of the Castle that Jack Built, and of another one built by an Elephant, and then again of the End of the World, which we run across one night by pure accident in Chelsea. And though times change, shall we have no more London Nights? Taxis be blowed! Watch this.”
He undid the cab door, and Snow-Flame undid himself and got out. Then the Taxi-Man pulled out a concertina and played The Maiden’s Prayer, and Snow-Flame waltzed entrancingly all round Trafalgar Square and died at Ginger’s feet. Gypsy swears that after this he turned a somersault and climbed the Nelson Column, but Ginger was weeping as she used to weep at the end of Lord George Sanger’s Circus, so she missed it.
When she wiped her eyes the Taxi-Man and Snow-Flame had gone home.
One night after a very hot day, when the moon was at her roundest, an unusual number of Gypsy and Ginger’s friends turned up at the Weatherhouse, because everybody who was awake in London had come to dip his head in the fountains. What made Trafalgar Square still more crowded was that They had been doing something to it during the day, and had roped off the bit that wasn’t quite done, and left a little man in a box inside it—“Like a Magician in his Magic Circle,” said Gypsy.
“I wonder if he’d let me in to see him do tricks,” mused Ginger.
“It mightn’t be safe, darling. Once inside the Circle——”
“It’s not really a circle, it’s a square,” said Ginger, “and you can always get out of a square because of the cracks in the corners. It’s only rings there’s no getting out off.”
“I shouldn’t risk it, though,” said Gypsy. “And here comes Jeremy and Rags for their sausages.”