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The child had now reached the poplar from which the rook had just flown and Philip was able to detect her tumbled brown hair and rough grey skirt peeping out from the poplar's trunk. He took a cautious step or two in the direction of the tree. “It's all right, child,” he called out. “What is it? Is it a game you're playing? Come here and tell me. I won't hurt you!” Thus spoke the instinctive father in Philip; for he had been quick to recognise the little daughter of Blackie Morgan.

The effect of his call was twofold. It sent the three other children scampering off at top-speed towards the safety of Number One's fence, while it caused Morgan Nelly, in order to prevent herself from yielding to a similar panic, to cling tightly to the poplar trunk with both her thin arms.

It was thus that Philip found his only child when he reached the tree. Her forehead was pressed against it and her fingers were frantically clutching its bark. He began to speak caressingly the moment he approached her, for he was touched by the look of those thin arms; and when he reached the tree he did what was perhaps the wisest thing he could have done, he sat down with his shoulders against it, so that the back of his cap almost touched her clasped hands.

Morgan Nelly could have escaped now if she'd wanted to and run straight off to Number One's fence, from behind which Jackie and Sis and Bert, under the protection of Number One himself, were watching with intense interest the development of this exciting drama; but when her father calmly lighted a cigarette and began to talk to her without trying to pull her arms away from the tree she felt at once reassured.

“I know who you are, child,” said Philip. “I knew when I saw your friends. For I know the children you go about with.”

There was no reply; but he caught a faint sound over his head which indicated that she'd unclasped her fingers.

“If you'll come and sit down here for a minute and talk to me, I'll give you a penny.”

There was no reply to this either; but the surface of the poplar tree served so well as a whispering gallery that he could hear her talking in a low murmur to herself. This was an old psychological device of Morgan Nelly's; and it was a way to exchange thoughts without the overt shock to one's shyness of officially addressing a stranger or being addressed. The stranger listened— indeed if he was wise he listened in silence—and Nelly acted as chorus for both.

“Jackie is just the same as Sis and Bert,” she rambled on. “He dared me to do it and said he'd follow me and come close when I were talking to Mr. Crow; but he ain't following me. He's talking to Number One. But they're all looking to see if Mr. Crow takes me up and sends me to jail for running ai( ev he. If he did do that, I'd be glad! I'd be glad to go anywhere that isn't here—even if 'twere jail.”

Philip puffed on at his cigarette, keeping a sharp eye upon the contractor and upon the surveyor who were now engaged in an earnest colloquy and an alert eye upon the three children and the old man. The only observer of his dialogue with his daughter upon whom Philip cast a relaxed, carefree and devil-may-care eye, the eye of a true begetter of bastards, was Betsy, Number One's brown and white cow, whose neck was stretched beyond all decency and restraint between the rails of her master's fence so as to crop the less familiar grass of Philip's field.

“Perhaps—I say perhaps—I might pay for a little girl I know, going to the seaside or to some very nice place.”

This was a bribe beyond the power of resistance in Philip's daughter. She slipped round the tree and stood in front of him, her hands behind her back.

“Mummy wouldn't let me take no money, for nothing” she said emphatically, looking down upon her progenitor with knitted brows. “That is, Mummy wouldn't, unless she were a little squiffy but not too squiffy. When she's too squiffy, Mummy do cry for Dad.”

“Was your Dad's name . . . Morgan?” enquired Philip with intent to discover how much the child knew.

Morgan Nelly nodded vigorously. “But you,” she added, “be me godfather . . . and a wicked, miser one; what'U never do me no good if I wait till Judgment Day.”

This revelation of the manner in which his name was passed about between mother and daughter was very significant to Philip.

“I mustn't set fire to the grass, must I?” he remarked amiably, extinguishing his cigarette by pressing it into the side of a molehill. He hitched himself up, after this, and fearing dampness in the grass thrust his cap beneath him.

“Your hair baint very grey!” exclaimed Morgan Nelly.

Philip smiled and instinctively smoothed his hair down with both his hands under this feminine scrutiny.

“Who said it was?” he enquired casually.

“Red said you was a grey-haired bewger,” said the child. ''What be a bewger, Mister?"

"Red? Oh, you mean that chap Robinson, that I dismissed lor cheek. Is he a friend of your mother's?*'

“He baint now,” responded Nelly confidentially. “Mummy do loathe the sight of his ugly mug.”

4Tm glad to hear that,“' said Philip grimly. ”Your mother and I are in agreement there, anyway."

“Number One says that they wold funny men do walk about when 'tis dark in this here girt field.”

“You mean old Abel over there?” said Philip. “What funny men is he talking about?”

“Them as lived where they moundies be . . . them as had King Arthur for their king.”

“Your friend's shaky in his history, Nelly,” said Philip, and he was conscious of an agreeable warmth under his ribs as he called his daughter by her name.

“Weren't King Arthur king in them days?” she asked.

“Not till much later, Nelly, according to most accounts.”

“Who were king in they times when folks lived on hurdles in water?”

“Heavens, child! I don't know,” groaned her father. A sharp pang at that moment shook some nerve within him. It would be nice to come home of an evening from the office and listen to this child's chatter. “I wonder if Tilly would-------” he thought.

But the little girl had become very pensive. She too found it extremely nice to have someone in addition to Number One with whom she could talk on the subjects that filled her mind. Jackie always wanted to be the hero of every conversation! What she liked was to enjoy prolonged speculation with someone clever enough to know when King Arthur lived but too grown-up to want to be King Arthur.

c 'Tis queer,“ she remarked, ”to think of they old funny men rowing in their boats where you be sitting now!"

But though Philip had no desire to be King Arthur, or to be any unknown neolithic hero, he resembled Jackie in his inability to brood for more than a minute over the mystery of the passing of time.

“Have you seen that boat in the museum, Nelly?” he enquired now, bringing the subject down to something concrete.

“No, Mister, I ain't seen 'un; and don't want to see 'un if Mr. Merry be there. He scolded me turble once when us played in museum-yard. He took Jackie's ball away and never gived it back. He kept Jackie's ball, he did, for his own self. 'Tweren't right of 'ee. Jackie said he'd tell policeman. But policeman be his friend. Policeman be allus in thik yard talking to he.”

Philip was silent. His daughter's attitude to these local magnates was so different from his own that he felt at a loss for a suitable comment.

“If you was one of they Lake Village men, Mister, and I were talking to 'ee, would you have a girt stick with a sharp flint on 'un and thee-self all naked like, or maybe a few big dock-leaves round thee's waist?”

Annoyed with himself for not being able to deal better with her rambling talk, which had now become so easy and natural, and was thus very agreeable to him, Philip actually felt his cheeks beginning to burn.

“You'd be glad enough I had a spear with a flint top,” he remarked, “if that cow over there were a sabre-toothed tiger or a mammoth.”

The little girl's eyes shone. “Would 'ee go after it now with thik spear and rip its belly open for it?” she enquired with panting eagerness.

Philip began to experience a definite fear that the child would soon want him to play a game with her, and rush off across the field with his stick, pretending that the harmless Betsy were a mammoth.

“Do you learn history at school, Nelly?” he enquired.

“Would you spear 'un under his ugly tail or would you spear 'un in his girt mouth?” said Nelly, disregarding his reference to school and to the study of history.

Philip liked it when she called him “you” instead of “Mister.” He stared at the ground beyond his daughter's grey skirt. Yes, it was certainly a queer thing that this grass should have been covered with a brackish expanse of water in those old days; but it was not a thing he cared to think about. In some subtle way it seemed to make his present activities less important. She certainly had a mind, this child; but it was more like her mother's than his! He remembered that it was just this sort of vague and to him rather desolate brooding that the big-eyed char-girl used to indulge in when he talked to her in Mrs. Legge's “other house.”

“I'm going to make a new road into Street and a bridge over the Brue,” he suddenly announced to her. He had not intended to say these words. He had not intended to refer to his present undertakings at all. It must have been a subconscious desire to boast of some great deed before his offspring, so as to make up to her for not going on with that story about mammoth-spearing.

“I don't like roads,” said Morgan Nelly. “I likes tow-paths and cattle-droves best. Jackie and me's going to play Indians in Wick Wood when the leaves are all down!”

“What will the gamekeeper say?” said Philip, whose idea of woods was associated with the sporting activities of his friend Zoyland.

“Oh, Jackie do know a gap into they woods! Sis can't get Bert through thik gap, but / can. I lifts he and pushes he till he be over. Us get bluebells there—bunches on 'em! And Jackie found a Muggie's nest wi' five eggs when us were there. Do 'ee hold wi5 taking more'n two eggs, Mister? Sis says 'tisn't right to take 'em all. She did cry, Sis did, when Jackie took 'em; and I made him put 'em back; all but two. Sis said the mother bird was wailing something pitiful, but Sis be soft over such things.”

“Fm going to make a bridge over there,” repeated Philip. He seemed driven by an impulse he could not resist to try at all costs to impress the child's mind. “If you don't like roads, Nelly, you surely like bridges?”

“That's Pomparles over there,” she said in an awed whisper, “where King Arthur threw away his sword.”

“I'm going to build a new bridge, another bridge, much bigger than Pomparles.”

The child looked at him with a look of horror. She was evidently deeply shocked.

“Not anywhere near Pomparles, are you?” she asked; while an expression of aversion and distaste came into her eyes.

“But, Nelly------” he pleaded with her, as if she were a

grown-up person, “my bridge will be ever so much bigger and broader; and a great many lorries will pass over it. Pomparles is a shaky old erection. Probably it'll have to be taken down. Progress can't stop because people are sentimental about a heap of old stones. That's narrowness, Nelly; that's prejudice, that's being soft and silly—like you said your friend Sis was!”

But he had shocked the little girl through and through by what he had said; and no special pleading, no references to Sis, could undo the harm he had done.

“Pomparles taken down? King Arthur's Bridge taken down? I don't like you, Mister! I hate you!”

Philip was astonished at the contortion of fury into which her face was convulsed.

“Come, come, come,” he said, “don't let's quarrel the moment we've begun to make friends.” He jumped up lightly to his feet and made as if he would lay his hands on her shoulders.

“They won't let you pull Pomparles Bridge down!” she cried, .skipping back out of his reach. “Mr. Geard won't let you!”

:4Mr. Geard couldn't stop me if I decided to do it," cried Philip rapidly growing as angry as the child was. It was not a sign of Philip's littleness but of his greatness that he could get so vehement in a dispute with a little girl. Napoleon would have done so; so would Alexander the Great; so would Nelson, so would Achilles. Most modern rulers would have laughed at her and retorted with some quip too ironical for her to understand.

“He could! He could! He could!” cried the little girl and putting out her tongue she shook her small fist violently at him and scampered off at a wild rush towards Number One's cottage.

Philip put on his cap very carefully and gravely, picked up his stick, and walked with leisurely steps towards the two men. “I shall say I scolded her for her bad behavior,” he thought. “She got impatient, like a spoilt child, in a minute, and answered rudely and ran away.” Thus would he explain to anyone who had seen their quarrel what it was that had happened.

“You've taken all the steps, I presume, Sir,” said the contractor to him a little later, “about getting leave from the county, and so on, to have this new road and this new bridge made?”

“Ceitainly. Of course!” replied Philip. 'Tve been lo the government offices in London about it, as well as to the countv offices in Taunton. The only thing that could possibly delay it would be some of these small proprietors—like that old man over there—making difficulties and asking too much. From what you Lwo gentlemen tell me it would really be most advisable to purchase his permission.“ He raised his voice at this point so as to include the Evercreech surveyor in his audience. ”I was saying that I think it will be necessary to pay whatever compensation that old Mr. Twig demands. If we brought it through Lake Village Field there might be some red-tape difficulties with the National Office and those things always delay matters so/'

'“They do, Sir,” said the surveyor.

"That's what I always says myself, Sir,*1'' said the contractor.

It was at this point that Philip's eye caught sight of two figures advancing along the tow-path on the high bank of the Brue. They were coming from the direction of Street and following the river in its northwesterly windings. Philip had no difficulty in recognising these figures—for he was as long-sighted as an Isle-of-Ely heron watching for fish—as those of Lady Rachel and Ned Athling.