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“Well! you run off now, Penny, and let Sam and me finish this couple of rows. Tell old Weatherwax it is the same. Let Miss Drew have what she wants; and cork up the bottle. I've got to do some work this morning if we're going to Whitelake. Never mind about those, Sam! I'll wheel away the rest myself. You go back to the house now with Penny; oh, and if you change the water in the aquarium, do find a bowl of some kind to put that minnow in! It's only been up at the top since yesterday afternoon and I changed the water two days ago.” (This expression “up at the top” referred to the habit of minnows when sick or dying of remaining with their heads upslanted at the top of the water breathing heavily.)

Sam Dekker surveyed the retreating form of Penny Pitches. He was of a lankier build than his father; and there was something pathetically animal-like about his shambling limbs. He had a clean-shaved, rather puckered face, with freckles all over it. His nose was long and thin, like the nose of some kind of honey-eating bear; and his small, greenish eyes were surrounded by many wrinkles. His upper lip was long, like his father's, but while Mat Dekker had a massive, square chin to support this peculiarity Sam had a weak, retreating chin. Sam's retreating chin was in many ways the most marked portion of his face, for it was creased with all manner of queer corrugations. He had a nervous trick of opening his mouth a little, drawing in his under jaw, and pulling down the corners of his underlip. The effect of these movements was to compel the contours of his chin to fuse themselves with the contours of his long neck. Had his face been anything but what it was, this trick of contorting his chin would have been much more noticeable; but where everything was so much out of proportion no particular lapse could become prominent. His greenish eyes almost closed as he stood there in a heavy daze, while his father, anxious to finish that long piece of weeding, bent again over his work. Sam Dekker was not one for moralising on the events of his life, nor for analysing his motives. He took for granted that it was just one more trick of Nature that his interest in fossils, in birds' eggs, in fishes, should lose its savour month after month, as he found himself entoiled in the beauty of Nell Zoyland. He took it for granted that in his weakness he should not dare to mention his entanglement to his father, that in his weakness he should lie to the old man as to the real meaning of the long solitary excursions he was always making these days, past Brindham and Splott's Moor, across Whitelake River to Queen's Sedgemoor; he took it for granted that he should be too unpractical and too cowardly to dream of carrying Nell off or of separating her from the formidable William, or of doing anything at all to clarif/ the situation. All he could do was to go on constantly seeing her, which intensified rather than resolved the dilemma he was in! He loved his father with the deep passive animal intensity with which he loved Nell. It was indeed his love for his father quite as much as his natural timidity that made it absolutely impossible that he should reveal to the older man the real tragedy of the situation. This tragedy was that not only did he love Nell Zoyland, but that Nell loved him, recklessly, shamelessly, and was constantly urging him, cost what it might to both of them, to carry her off! It had been the deepest and the most exciting astonishment of his life, the fact that a girl as lovely as Nell could love an ugly, lumpish, uninteresting failure, such as he felt himself to be; Nell, too, who had so original, so surprisingly good-looking a man as Will Zoyland for her mate! William was, it is true, a good deal older than Nell; but what a man he was, with his* leonine beard and rolling blue eyes, his enormous courage, his immense physical strength! Under the low forehead of Sam Dekker there stirred strange feelings towards this formidable rival whose power of character was so little to be trifled with. Even Sam's father, no negligible personage himself, showed evident respect for William Zoyland. It was indeed this respect of Mat Dekker "s for the bearded man that had brought about the excursion this afternoon, an excursion which, though he had himself reminded his father of it, filled Sam's heart with deep uneasiness.

Now, as he slowly plodded off to refill the aquarium in their play-room, he cursed Penny Pitches for her uncalled-for outburst. What had induced the absurd woman to meddle in his affairs? Never before had she deliberately and wilfully betrayed him to his father. As a rule in any trifling misunderstanding between her two men she took the side of her master's son against her master. The more he thought about it the less he understood it. Penny, he knew, was anything but puritanical. The indecent jokes that passed between her and old Weatherwax were the standing disgrace of Glastonbury Vicarage, “How much does she know?” he asked himself as he entered the house; and the idea that some gossiping crony of the old woman had seen his meetings with Nell on Crannel Moor or in the old barn on Godney Marsh began to taunt his brain.

Left to himself to finish his weeding, Mat Dekker sternly put out of his mind the whole matter of Penny's attack upon Sam. Dekker's nature was a rich, deep, passionate one; but his religion had assisted him in bringing it under a rare and unusual control. One of the chief things he had learnt to do was to obliterate every sexual suspicion. One of Mat's favorite writers was St. Paul; and he had made a custom of forcing himself not to think evil, a characteristic of that divine Agape which, according to St. Paul, held the magic clue to the universe.

But there was a power now shining down upon Mr. Dekker that cared nothing for St. Paul. The soul of the great burning sun which illuminated that massive, iron-grey, bent head had many times ere this been roused to anger against him. Among the myriads of conscious beings peopling that hemisphere of our planetary orb who refused in that spring solstice to make the sort of grateful gesture towards this great Deity which the Powers of Nature demand of those they favour, this ruddy-faced man in shirtsleeves bending now over his potato bed seemed to that flaming heart the most obdurate and the most sacrilegious. “Let his Christ protect him!” thought (if we can call the titanic motions of super-consciousness in such a Power by the name of “thought”) this great outpourer of life heat. “As for us, we will let loose his own offspring upon him; and the thing he loves most in the world we will rouse up against him!”

It must have been about six hours after their talk with Penny Pitches in the potato garden that Sam Dekker, troubled at heart by what he considered the gross and inexplicable treachery of his foster-mother, sat gloomily by himself on the warm steps of the Abbey House terrace. A little below him, on wooden seats placed side by side, above a low parapet, sat Miss Euphemia Drew and her other guests. The more Sam meditated upon that afternoon's excursion to Whilelake, the more troubled he became. Would his father detect anything? Would Nell in her agitation as hostess forget her prudence? Had William Zoyland secretly planned the whole affair in order to nip in the bud this perilous growth whose frail seedling-shoot he had already discerned? “I shall get red,” he thought, “I shall get red as a turkey-cock, just as Penny said. My hand will shake when she gives me my tea. We shan't dare to look at each other, or speak to each other. Father's bound to notice something.”

Had Nell Zoyland seen the lad at this moment and watched the puckering of his freckled forehead and the way, as he rose now to offer help to Mary, the muscles of his poor chin contracted, she would have loved him more than ever. Mary's own face, as she carried a silver tray in one hand and a coffee jug in the other, was drawn and white. It was all over as far as Miss Drew was concerned! She knew that already, though the lady had not spoken a word to her on the subject. John had behaved with irretrievable folly at lunch; had talked wildly; had expressed disbelief in the legend of the Holy Thorn, had announced that it was a pity that the Danes had been turned back at Havyatt Gap and finally had declared that the discovery of Joseph of Arimathea's tomb was the mere mummery of the monks! Yes; it was all over for them with Miss Drew. She would never ask him again. She would never let her meet him again. It would be a lucky thing if she dicfyr£ pack her oil, then and there, merely for having such a cousirX

When Mary, with Sam helping her, for both Miss Drew's cook and housemaid, the sisters Rogers, had begun to wash up, joined the rest of the party on the terrace, John had fallen into a more amiable mood. He still remained irresponsive about the Holy Thorn, but he had evidently taken a fancy to Mr. Dekker, and he was listening now quite humbly while the Vicar narrated to him in a grave and unaffected tone certain historic facts about the Ruins before them.

“Hie jacet sepultus inclitus Rex Arturus in Insula Avallonia” recited Mat Dekker in a deep, quiet voice. “The end of the twelfth century it was,” he went on, “when they found the coffin, a great hollowed-out oak trunk, with the bones of the king and queen. Nearly a hundred years later Edward the First buried them before the high altar. The books say that Leland the Antiquary actually saw them as late as the sixteenth century. Since then they have been lost to sight.” The Vicar of Glastonbury sighed as he ceased speaking, and at the same moment a light wind from the west, rustling across the masses of ruined masonry caught the topmost twigs of the tall elms on the right of the Tower Arch and made them bow before it.

“When I told my good friend Mr. Evans this morning,” began John Crow, “that I had been invited here, it did excite him! He quoted what he called a Welsh Triad—something about no one knowing where the grave of Arthur was.”

Miss Euphemia Drew folded her cream-coloured cashmere shawl more tightly round her neck, hiding the gold-mounted moonstone brooch that clasped her bodice; and then, turning her chin above the wrinkled fingers she had thus raised to her throat,, “Not know where it is?” she said sternly. “Fiddle-de-dee! we all know where it is! It's under that broken arch.”

Mary tried to convey to her cousin by a rapid glance that he must accept the verdict of Miss Drew as to the grave of the great king without further question. But the run-down Danish adventurer refused to be stopped. “My friend Mr. Evans quoted a Latin jingle too. What was it, Sir? I expect you know k It began with Hie jacet, just as yours did.”

Mat Dekker smiled sadly. “You mean 'Hie jacet Arturus, rex quondam, rexque futurus'? Is that what he said? 'King once and king to be,'” he added, with his clerical instinct for making things clear. “Most of our Glastonbury sayings have to do with some sort of 'Hie jacet,9” he concluded rather wistfully.

“Would you say, Sir,” enquired John, “that King Arthur is really the most deeply rooted superstition that this place represents?” The younger Dekker began to feel seriously angry with the East Anglian. It was all very well to display a lack of antiquarian interest. But here, on this terrace, gazing out at Edgar's Chapel, at the great Tower Arch, at St. Mary's Church, at St. Thomas' Chapel, at the rich ruins of the most sacred ecclesia vetusta in all Britain, to definitely challenge the whole genius loci seemed to Sam's simple mind as much a lapse from Nature's ways as it would have been to allow a minnow to perish for lack of fresh water.

But the elder Dekker seemed totally unconscious of the insult to the spot he loved. “Well, of course to our old-fashioned Protestant ancestors Glastonbury must have reeked with what you call 'superstition.' Three famous Saxon kings are buried here, something like six well-known saints are buried here. All the Holy Grail legends gather to a head here. The Druids played a great part here; and long before the Druids there was a Lake Village'' —he gave a grave, characteristically West-country jerk with his head to indicate the northwestern point of the compass—”whose mounds you can still see in the fields. Ancient British that probably was; older anyway than History! But I expect the deepest-rooted superstition here, if you could compel Glastonbury Tor to speak, would turn out to be the religion of the people who lived before the Ancient Britons; perhaps even before the Neolithic Men. At any rate we have some excuse for being 'superstitious' in these parts. Don't you think so, Miss Drew?"

“I think you are very kind, dear Vicar, to answer Mr. Crow's question at all,” said the old lady severely. “For myself I would answer it rather differently. I would assure him that what he calls superstition we call the Only True Faith.”

This remark produced a complete silence.

“My friend Mr, Evans,”—it was John who broke the spell—

"says that it's neither King Arthur nor Joseph uf Arimathea that's the real hidden force still active in Glastonbury.*'

"What does he say it is?*' enquired Mary, hoping against hope that John would, even now, redeem himself.

“He won't say. He gets reserved and touchy. It's my own opinion that it has to do with Merlin. But I expect I'm all wrong. When I mentioned Merlin all he did was to quote a lot of Welsh Triads in Welsh. He's a queer character, my friend Evans, but he interests me very much.”

“Will you take some more coffee or some more brandy, Vicar?” interrupted Miss Drew in a tone that seemed to say, “When once I have exposed the unpleasantness of a rude young man there is no need for him to make further efforts to reinstate himself in my favour.” And then when the Vicar had shaken his head, “Carry the trays away, child, please; and tell Lily and Rogers that you and I will get our own tea today.”

The cook's name was Louie Rogers. She was only a year older than Lily and as a rule Miss Drew called her Louie; but when upset by the spectacle of the world's disorder she always called her Rogers. It had been her mother's as well as her grandmother's custom to call their cooks by their surnames and Miss Drew reverted to it as a sort of invocation of these thin-lipped, tenderly stern women, whose miniatures were on her writing-table. The mere utterance of the word “Rogers” seemed to Miss Drew to bring back decency and respect to human intercourse.

John had not the courage nor the wit to rise from his chair and help his cousin carrying her tray into the house; so it worked out that Sam Dekker once more was her companion. But Sam never addressed a single word to her as he walked by her side. His sole thought was his growing dread of the afternoon's encounter. Mary herself pondered bitterly upon the interior meaning of Miss Drew's little speech about their tea. It meant a kind of emotional unbending, an intimacy, a crisis of sympathetic confidence; but it also meant that under no conceivable circumstances would her employer allow her to go on meeting her cousin. Ladies who live together possess these indirect ways of communicating with each other and by the tone in which Mary replied, “Yes, dear, that will be so nice!” Miss Drew knew that while there would be nothing in the nature of a scene between them, the separation of Mary from John would take more than one evening's dignified protest.