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The man's sensations followed one another, like straws on a splashing water-fall, during the few seconds of Nell's words to that tumbled couch from which his own burly form now warded off the candleflame.

“Come on upstairs, Nell,” he said, moving toward her. “We'll talk this out better upstairs. It's not Eudoxia's fault.”

“Don't come near me—don't touch me!” cried his wife, with scarlet cheeks and flashing eyes.

“Come on upstairs, Nell!” he repeated in a quiet voice that was full nevertheless of a formidable resolution. Those invisible naturalists—belonging to regions of Being more powerful, I will not say “higher” than ours—who take a peculiar and doubtless sometimes a decisive interest, as Mat Dekker did with his aquarium, in human dramas as tense as this—must have been impressed by Zoyland's calm and masterful handling of this situation. They would have seen that all his real tenderness was for his wife—they would have seen that he regarded Ms affair with Miss Pippard as of no more consequence than if he'd been caught stealing cherries. But they would also have noted that he had the rare gift of using violence in cold Mood. For instead of

being in the remotest degree intimidated by Nell's electric fury__

and in her fit of blind sex-reaction the gentle girl struggled like a pantheress in his arms—he lifted her up, as Zookey might have lifted little Master Henry, and carried her bodily up the stairs into the room above, when he laid her—Zookey Pippard having discreetly closed the door of the ante-room—upon the bed. by the side of her sleeping first-born.

The aforementioned celestial naturalists would not have been deceived, as certainly the terrified Eudoxia was, into regarding NelFs furious anger as a deep and tragic feeling. They would have commented to one another—over this Whitelake aquarium of anthropoid minnows—to the effect that had Nell been really tragically hurt she would have hugged her baby to her heart where she was, and never come down those stairs so deliberately, so softly, and so bent on righteous retribution!

What Eudoxia beheld when she removed the bedclothes from her head was the wide-open door of the staircase, the flickering candle on the table, the twisted blue girdle of Nell's dressing gown lying in the same pool of moonlight as her own slippers and her paramour's boot, and the untouched heap of the master's clothes piled up in the wicker chair over by the bookcase.

Sitting up in bed with beating heart, the girl surveyed these objects for a second or two. Then, under her breath, deeply, passionately, concisely—and it must be confessed with no little justification—she cursed “the womb that bore her and the paps that had given her suck.”

“It's all your fault, Mother!” she wailed in her heart. “This is the last time I'll listen to 'ee! I'll go back to Moorleaze tomorrow, so help me God!” . - .

The first of the guests to arrive on the following afternoon, which turned out to be a neutral day, as days go, neither wet nor fine, neither windless nor gusty, neither warm nor particularly chill, was the Marquis of P. and the Lady Rachel,

Lord P. arrived in a thoroughly nervous and crusty humour. Zoyland and Nell had barely finished their late lunch, cooked by Zookey in sulky silence—her daughter having gone off to catch the nine o'clock bus to Frome, intending to quit the bus at Wanstrow, and make the best of her way, without even risking a telegram, safe back to her deserted goslings of Croft Pond.

The Marquis went at once for a stroll by the river with his son, leaving Sergeant Blimp to dispose of the green-wheeled dog-cart and the black horse, as best he might.

“I've got a piece of news for you, Will,” he declared with an assumed eagerness, as soon as they were out of hearing. The bastard shrugged his great shoulders. He knew his father too well. The long-winded dissimulation of the House of Lords pulled no wool over his eyes.

“The Governor's been making an ass of himself,” he thought grimly. “This is his regular beginning!”

The old man's profile, as he watched it moving by his side with the scrubby Vandyke beard and prominent nose, seemed to have grown perceptibly sharper since he saw it last. The aged nobleman had a pinched, frustrated, tired look on his old warrior's face, as if he'd been wearing his suit of chain-armour too many years, and would be glad enough to make his will and lie down with his forefathers in Wells Cathedral.

“I shan't have to sell Mark Court,” said Lord P., “that's one good thing. I did a good stroke of business last night, me boy. I wish you could have seen how I led 'em on and hustled 'em and rustled 'em and tussled 'em.”

“Christ, Dad!” cried the other, in great alarm, snatching at his father's sleeve and bringing him to a halt, while he swung round to face him. “What have you gone and done now?”

“They came last night,” said the old gentleman. “Three of the devils came! One was your wife's brother, the Bolshevist—an honest chap, by the way, that fellow is,—and an agitator of some sort—an impossible individual; and the third bloke was a clever lawyer from the Scilly Isles—called Trent. He very soon realised with whom he had to deal. The other two had seemed inclined to sermonise me. They took the tone that if I didn't let 'em have their way this time now, I'd be far worse caught later on. But I soon let 'em see 1 wasn't the sort of person they could rush like that! But this fellow Trent seems to have made a pretty close study of all the Glastonbury leases and properties; and he helped me to make your Bolshevist relative see my points when I explained the situation.”

"For God's sake what have you done, Sir?*' cried the bastard, mightily alarmed.

The old man straightened his shoulders and leaned forward a little, bowing stiffly from his waist, like a soldier and a courtier, but digging his cane deeply into the tow-path mud.

“Well, I'll tell you, lad,” he said, leaning on the handle of his stick. “I've fixed things now so that I shan't have to worry any more about my income, for years to come. Fve been looking *vp the entail and those brothers of yours—damn their souls! A lot they care for my troubles!—have no word to speak in this. The Zoyland entail doesn't touch Glastonbury.”

“You've gone and sold------” cried the bastard.

“No, I haven't, lad. Don't get excited too soon. All I've sold to 'em, and for a good round sum too, I can assure you, is that section of the dye works properties that are on my land. That's the newest section, you know. That Crow fellow will look yellow in the gizzard when I clear him out; and a good thing too. He's been taking things too much for granted, the snappy close-' mouthed rogue! But for the rest; for the High Street shops and for the Bove Town and Paradise property; I've let 'em have those on a fifty years' lease, and at a thousand pounds higher rent, too, than I got from the tradesmen and the slum-tenants. It's a first-rate piece of business, lad! Old Beere is furious, of course. But that's because I did it over his head. But a lot he's done for me these last years—except eat my pheasants and tell me indecent yarns about his daughter and your wife's sister-in-law, who everybody told me was soft on Crow! He's in his dotage, old Beere is. He thinks it's a great glory and a mark of gentility in him that he's got a daughter who don't run after the boys! I told the old fool that his sort of gal would murder him for his cash if he wasn't careful.”

William Zoyland jerked himself uncivilly away from his father and took a hurried step along the tow-path.

So this was what that slippery lawyer from Cornwall had been up to all these weeks in that new office of his! Had he got round old Beere? No!—impossible. But brother Dave was certainly behind it! Who would have supposed that that funny little man would have had the gumption------ But of course the fellow at the back of the whole thing was that wily old humbug, Geard. He was the one! “I must run off and tell Philip,” he thought, “this afternoon; as soon as the christening is over. The newest section of the dye works sold!—Why it's a serious blow! Of course he has the others . . . but it's serious, it's terribly serious. How on earth will Philip take it?”

He came striding back to his father.

“Well . . . you have gone and done it!” he rapped out brutally. “But let's see if I've got it clear what youVe done. You've sold that newest piece of factory-land to them? The one north of Manor House Road and southeast of the Burnham and Ever-creech Railway? That other one, east of the cemetery, doesn't belong to you? Philip Crow is still safe there? But listen—are you sure that the buildings on that newest section are yours to sell? I mean the whole plant? Didn't that man—what's-his-name, that Crow bought out—sell him all those buildings with the good-will?”

The Marquis stroked the point of his grey beard.

“Couldn't sell what wasn't his, lad! No, no! That newest section of buildings near the Burnham Railway, was built by the business man of our family, your great-uncle, Lord Edward. That was before the days when you were a baby in petticoats, out there at Limoges. I took your mother to see 'em . . . had a pretty narrow shave too-, that day, of being nabbed ... she had the devil's own spirit, that woman, . . . when it came to skating on thin ice . ? . just like you, me boy!”

While this conversation was going on, Lady Rachel was being introduced to little Master Henry.

Zookey Pippard recovered her temper a little in the excitement of dressing the babe in its christening-robe; and for some reason only known to its own passionate and highly strung spirit the infant took a violent fancy to Rachel, clinging to the finger she gave it cr*i smiling and slobbering in rapture when she received it in her lap.

The next to arrive among the expected guests was none other than Mat Dekker. The tall massive form of the priest was arrayed in his long black Sunday coat, and he had taken a lot of trouble to wipe his thick boots with swathes of grass before presenting himself at the door of Whitelake Cottage. He had forgotten, however, to change his week-day trousers, and these looked more faded and shabby than usual. The man was obviously strung-up and full of seething emotions; but he kept himself well in control, and begged quite naturally for a little tete-a-tete with the mother of this newly enrolled soldier of Christ. It was a strange moment for both of them when the mother and the grandfather of Henry Sangamore Rollo Zoyland sat opposite each other in that low-ceilinged bedroom, at the top of those stairs down which the girl had carried her candle to such drastic purpose the night before.

She lay now at full length on the bed, propped up on two pillows, while her child, though fast asleep in its cradle between them, did not separate her very far from the priest.

Fortunately or unfortunately, as it may chance to be, the amorous clairvoyance of a woman is lulled, drugged, drowsed, deliciously stupefied, by the magical sensation of giving suck. Although her child was fast asleep now, the feeling of its exacting lips, of its masterful thirst for the fount of her life, was still clinging to her responsive body, and rendering it dull, tranced, entoiled, preoccupied, to all other sensitised awareness! Thus as she allowed Mat Dekker to retain her cold schoolgirl fingers across the counterpane of the sleeping child, resting her hand with his, in fact, upon the wicker edge of the cradle, it never entered her head that this man—her dear love's father—had anything in his heart toward her except a deep priestly sympathy. She knew she felt no shyness of him; she knew she felt a lovely and relaxed security in his presence; she knew she was deriving from the touch of his rough fingers an inrush of spiritual strength; but beyond this she experienced, or, was conscious of experiencing, no intimate link between them.

There was one restraint, however, that did come over her, and that puzzled her a little as she struggled in her mind to overcome it—a singular difficulty in mentioning his son's name to him. She longed to call out to this silent, rugged, friendly supporter: “And now tell me everything about my Sam!” But some inexplicable force always held back the words, just as they slid, like drops of recurrent rain from the smooth stalk of her happy peace, to the tip of her tongue.

“Why can't I ask him how Sam is?” she thought to herself. “It must be because of his religion. He's come to baptise Sam's child—but he doesn't want to think of us together.”

With this explanation in her mind, she let herself relax again on her pillows and close her eyes, pressing the hand that held her own in a confiding and trusting clasp. It was Mat himself who broke this silence, at last.

“I've been thinking a great deal lately, Nell,” he said, “about this grand consecration day of the Mayor's. It's to be in January they tell me now; and I hear the wildest tales, as I go about among my people, as to what the man is planning.” He sighed heavily, as he spoke, and Nell took the opportunity of repossessing herself of her right hand which she promptly made use of to pull her blue robe more tightly about her.

Deeply had Mat Dekker sighed when he spoke of the Mayor of Glastonbury; and the girl, in her maternal atrophy of the sex nerve, had put the sigh down entirely to the delicate professional problem of how to deal with Mr. Geard's wild and fantastic schemes. But, of course, in reality, not more than a thousandth part of this heavy sigh had anything to do with Mr. Geard's activities.

They were interrupted by the appearance of Zookey Pippard who came to tell them that all the other guests had duly arrived and that his Lordship was growing impatient for the ceremony to begin.

Zookey approached the cradle and Mat Dekker stood up.

“I hope this isn't the first time, Zookey,” said the priest with a kindly chuckle—he was always a transformed man when he dealt with the native-born, a touch of the old Quantocks' accent entering, so to speak, his very manner as well as his intonation—

“that you'll have heard me say a prayer, since—but us won't let the Missus know how well we know each other, shall us?”'

Under normal conditions this indulgent indiscretion, referring to an occasion when the worthy man had rescued this tricky old baggage from the clutches of Mr. Sheperd, would have met with a roguish retort. But the naughty old woman was still smarting from Nell's anger over Eudoxia.

“His Lordship said to her Ladyship just now,55 Mrs. Pippard retorted, humming and murmuring over the baby and giving its tiny red cheek a fillip with her finger-nail. ”What be Dr. Dekker doing upstairs? Be he a-baptising of she!"