“Goodbye!” she called after Polly, over the sound of a brass band which had struck up “Show Me the Way to Go Home.”

“Don’t be frightened. Everything will work out all right in the end.” She stood there, looking after her, oblivious to the music, the noise, the people shoving and jostling against her, till Polly was out of sight.

Then she turned to go look for Alf and Binnie, though she had no idea at all how to find them in this solid mass of people.

There was a whoosh and a boom from over by the National Gallery, followed by screams. Alf’s fireworks. She started toward the fountains, hoping to climb up on the rim and get a better look, pushing her way through the crowd past several tipsy soldiers and a man enthusiastically selling Churchill buttonhole badges, toward an elderly man in a black suit who was attempting to go in the same direction she was. If she could follow in the opening he made, she might be able to—

“Mr. Humphreys!” she called, recognizing him. She caught hold of his sleeve, and he turned to see who had grabbed him.

“Hello!” she said, shouting over the din.

“Miss O’Reilly!” he shouted back, and then, as if he was greeting her at the door of St. Paul’s, “How nice to see you!”

He looked around at the swirling, shoving mob. “I’m attempting to get to St. Paul’s. Dean Matthews rang me up and said there are hundreds gathering at the cathedral already, and I thought I’d best go see if I could assist.”

He beamed at her. “This is a wonderful night, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” she said, looking around at the crowd. She had wanted to come here, to see this, ever since she was a first-year student. She’d been furious when she’d found out Mr. Dunworthy had assigned it to someone else.

But if she’d come then, she would never have properly appreciated it. She’d have seen the happy crowds and the Union Jacks and the bonfires, but she’d have had no idea of what it meant to see the lights on after years of navigating in the dark, what it meant to look up at an approaching plane without fear, to hear church bells after years of air-raid sirens.

She’d have had no idea of the years of rationing and shabby clothes and fear which lay behind the smiles and the cheering, no idea of what it had cost to bring this day to pass—the lives of all those soldiers and sailors and airmen and civilians. And of Mike and Mr. Simms and Mrs. Rickett and Sir Godfrey, who’d been killed two years ago on his way home from entertaining the troops. She’d have had no idea what this meant to Lady Denewell, who’d lost her husband and her only son, or to Mr. Humphreys and the rest of the fire watch, who’d worked so hard to save St. Paul’s and who, hopefully, would never know what had eventually happened to it.