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Sam was silent. For the first time that day he felt that he couldn't bring himself to speak of his Vision. And yet what a thing that he couldn't. Had human beings maltreated one another to such a tune that it was a sort of mockery even to mention that the Holy Grail had come back to earth?

Without breathing a word of what he had seen to this man, he could hear him say: “It's because you've 'ad your leisure from our sweat that youVe got any spunk left to fuss with the 5OIy Grile. We be too dog-gone done-in of a Sunday znorning to do anything but sleep in our bleedin' beds!”

Thus it happened that in spite of his having declared to Mother Legge and Mr. Wollop that he was going to tell everyone he met, he found, when he went on down Magdalene Street, along the southern wall of the Abbey meadow, that not only had he not told Robinson, but that when he met Harry Stickles, the chemist, bustling home to his tea and his beautiful Nancy, he made no attempt, although he had bought his Windsor soap of him a day or two ago, to interrupt a busy citizen of Ms kidnev, Jili news of such a bagatelle!

While Sain was approaching the turn to Street Road, Crunv mie, left quite alone in Cardiff Villa to prepare for her supper with Miss Drew, for the Mayor and the Mayoress had gone for the evening to the city of Wells, was sitting, as she often was these days, by herself in her childhood's bedroom, where ail the pictures on the wall, the little childish sketch entitled “Crum-mie by Crummie,” and the eloquent, if not artistic, Series of the Seasons, jabbered and gibbered at her, languished and lisped at her, with memories of the married Cordelia.

As usual the younger daughter of Geard of Glastonbury sa! on the edge of her maiden bed admiring her legs. If it had not been that Crummie's heart, independently of her legs altogether, had fallen in love with Sam, the chances are that from sheer good-nature she would long ago have married one of her innumerable admirers in the town. But if the truth about the girl must be told, Crummie, in reality, was not attracted to men. This is a paradox which poor Cordelia—who was strongly attracted to men and was now living a life of intoxicated eroticism with Mr. Evans—would have laughed at, considering how the sight of Crummie's admirers had troubled her. But such was the exact truth! What Crummie was attracted to, was not her men—their personalities, their looks, their ways—but the reflection of herself, and particularly of her incomparable legs, in the mirror of her men's eyes.

It is the greatest mistake in the world to assume that the sort of narcissism in which Crummie indulged was selfish or ungenerous. It is true she derived an exquisite and indescribably voluptuous pleasure from admiring herself, from caressing herself, as she was doing at this moment; but it was a pleasure she longed to share with as many people as possible—women quite as much as men! Nor was she fastidious. Naturally not, considering that what primarily stirred her was not these alien personalities in their intrinsic qualities but the degree of their excitement in the presence of her own charms.

On the other hand the girl was so essentially humble and so free from malice or spitefulness, that a very small measure of this excitement was enough to satisfy her. But in Sam's case everything was different. Her feeling for Sam was a most delicate, vibrant and totally self-forgetful feeling. Nor would she have been at all anxious for Sam to enter at this moment and see her beautiful bare legs. Sam was the only person in the world before whom Crummie was bashful, shamefaced, super-modest. She would have felt like sinking into the ground with shame— that is how she would have expressed it to herself—if Sam had burst in now and beheld the satiny whiteness of her limbs; soft and tantalising and of maddening loveliness. What she wanted Sam to admire in her was her intellect, her searching intelligence, her ideal sentiment, her religious soul; and the pathetic thing was that Providence had not only refrained from endowing Crummie with these gifts but had not even given her a limited success in the art of pretending to possess them.

Crummie's unique gift from Nature, the most exquisite thighs that had been seen in Glastonbury since those of Merlin's perfidy ous Nineue, and which to herself, in her orgies of narcissism, were so pleasure-yielding, were, as far as Sam was concerned, something almost to be ashamed of. She would have preferred to appear before Sam in a heavy nun's garment descending to the ground and with her fair hair covered up by a black hood. How could she have possibly known that it was Sam before whom she was now destined, to appear, when, hearing the doorbell ring, she hurriedly put on her skirt, wrapt herself in an old woolen dressing-gown, and with her fair hair loose and her bare feet in little tattered slippers ran downstairs.

Her feelings when she saw him standing there weie so overwhelming that for a second she swayed in the doorway and nearly fainted away. Had she done so it would have been precisely in the manner of those tender impossible heroines in the only works of art she had ever honestly enjoyed! What she felt was something that no consecutive human language, trying to convey a clear-edged impression, could possibly express. Sam's figure suddenly appearing before her at her own doorstep evoked that bewildering, staggering sense of the very nature of things shifting, altering, transforming, which the Magdalene must have had when the apparent gardener at the Arimathean lomb murmured the magic word “Mary!”

It was not so much a living man she saw, as her whole secret life, all the gathered up and accumulated lonsinas, reserves, broodings, dreams of the last twelve months. He was not a thins of palpable outline at all, of definite contour or oi solid substance. He was a cloud of filmy essences, vague yearnings, precious dreams, dear hopes, wild idolatries. It was a shivering anguish as well as a wild ecstasy to see him embodied there, in an ordinary human form, familiar and natural.

So un-selfconscious did this adorer of her own sweet flesh become in her rapture of seeing him, hearing him, touching him, that when she had taken his coat and hat and brought him into the musty drawing-room and put him in her father's chair with the bear rug at his feet, she sank down before the fire without a thought of stirring its dying embers, or of lighting more than one solitary candle with a spill thrust deep into those flickering coals. Across her bare feet, before she realised the necessity of hiding them under her robe, fluttered the rosy fire gleams. Down upon her loosened hair fell the yellow rays of that solitary candle, while from the un-shuttered window, open at the top as her mother had left it, the cool evening air circled round them both, full of the dewy smells of the damp meadows at the road's end.

Even our poor vision-wtought Holy Sam was not so dehumanised as not to feel that there was something about this moment that was charged with portentous issues, something fatal, something totally unforeseen, something that held the future in its quivering crucible.

Crummie was in such a mood of unutterable awe and pent-up ecstasy at having her idol, her more than earthly lover, alone in the house with her, that she found difficulty in uttering a word, and when she did speak it was in a solemn, breathless whisper. So potent however is the concentrated love of the feminine heart, that although this man, sitting there above her, had just beheld —actually in the flesh—that elusive Mystery which was the cause of Glastonbury's being Glastonbury, it was the girl and not the man who dominated that moment, her exultation, and not his, that held the thunder-flash of that charged air.

“I never . . . thought,” she whispered with intense emotion, not presuming to raise her eyes above the muddy soles of Sam's boots, “that I'd ever . . . have you . . . here alone.”

“Dear Crummie!” and he made a timid movement of his hand towards her head, but quelled by the intensity of her feeling let his wrist fall back on his knee, where it lay limp, with Angela's handkerchief round it.

“I've got . . . so much ... to say to you . . . that it's . . . hard to begin.”

She made an effort to lift up her face and smile at him; but dawn her fair head sank again, as if she had been rehearsing once more her Pageant-part of the Lady of Shalott.

“Dear Crummie!” he repeated in a scarcely more audible voice than her own.

But then, gathering up the happiness within him as if it were a crystal cup that he stretched oui, to her, “Fve had an experience today, Crummie,” he said, "that has unsettled all my ideas; that's made me feel as if I'd never lived till today. I told Nell once, Crummie, that I thought I had a dead nerve in me. Well! Well! You don't want to hear about that ... but it was true . . . but------»

“I can understand you,” the girl murmured. “You needn't stop telling me for any reason—no! Not for any reason!”

“It wasn't a fancy; it wasn't a madness,” he went on, “Crummie dear, I saw it! Yes, I saw the Grail Itself.”

Now that he had told her, instead of his happiness being less, it became greater. Her long, slow, grave, childish look of absolute faith made him feel that this was the first time he had spoken of it to anyone. To those other people he must have been speaking of something else!

“And the effect it's had on me, Crummie, is to make me feel that I've seen Eternity. So that now I needn't worry myself any more about so many things! Behind the tortured Christ, behind that other Christ, behind the people we love and the people we've hurt . . . behind everything that's sacred to us ... is Eternity. Do you know what I mean, little Crummie? I feel now”—there was a poignant tenderness, not so much an affectionate or even human tenderness, as it was something reseiiiblkis the feelins her father would have shown for a wounded loach- about the tone in which he spoke to her; and it seemed in a sense to be a grotesque tone for that superbly beautiful creature crouching between the candle flame and the dying coals—6“I feel now that my life has really finished itself, accomplished itself somehow: and what I want to do now is just to take it as it is and to give it to anyone, to anything, to whatever comes along, following chance and accident, and not bothering very much—do you see what I mean, Crummie?—taking eve:rything as it happens—since Fve seen Eternity!”

He needn't have asked her if she understood him. She had been following every wTord with the absorbed attention with which a prisoner hears his sentence or a gambler watches his throw of the dice. When he had finished she moved away from him a little, and bending down before the high bronze fender pressed her forehead against its top bar, while with her hands she clutched its shining knobs.

It was clear, even to the bemused and bewildered Sam that she was struggling with herself and making some momentous decision. Her decision, whatever it was, was made very quickly. She lifted her head from the fender and rose to her feet, clutching her robe tightly round her and gazing down upon him, where he still lay back at ease in her father's big arm-chair.

“I've got something to tell you, Mr. Sam,” she said. All his father's parishioners called him Mr. Sam, Never in her life had she called him Sam.

He gave her at once his full attention. He sat straight up on the extreme edge of the arm-chair; his hands on his elbows, his heels beneath it, his head raised. He looked like a boy whose pockets are full of apples and pears giving polite attention to the conversation of an elder sister.

“There are very few men,” she began, “who can live alone as you do, Mr. Sam. But I know you are doing wrong in doing it. Mrs. Zoyland belongs to you; she has given herself completely to you-; she has had a child; and I know that I am telling you what's right when I tell you that you two ought not to live separated any more. There are things that a girl knows more about than any man and this is------”

She stopped abruptly. From a portion of her powerful nature— for after all she was Mr. Geard's daughter—that had never been roused by Sam, she suddenly felt a wave of irrational anger against him. Once when she was a little girl and had been caressing a rag doll, for which she nourished, just as she did for Sam, a devoted, idealising love, she caught a look on its face that seemed so unresponsive that, filled with wrath against it, she snatched it up and dashed it upon the floor.

In the midst of her present speech—it was when she reached the words “she has had a child”—she gesticulated with her hands, forgetting to hold the folds of her long dressing-gown. Released from her fingers her robe fell apart, revealing the fact that beneath her skirt her legs and feet were bare.

It was then that she imagined she beheld, mingling with the dazed, indulgent, stupid courtesy of Sam's attention to her that particular look upon his face that women are so quick to catch; the look, namely, of displeasure rather than pleasure at some intimate and revealing gesture they have made. That such a look should have appeared on her idolised Sam's face, on this night of all nights, hurt her to the quick.

It was a swift blinking of the eyelids, a scarcely perceptible twitch of the chin; but she received the impression that the sight of her bare ankles had affected him as something disconcerting. She knew well that normal men have two distinct reactions to a girl's bare legs—thp first one of provoked desire, with all its glamour and mystery, and the second, one of fastidious shrinking; and although towards her idealised love she was humble as a child about her beauty, she was also as shy and touchy as a child about any personal exposure.

The fact, therefore, that she had caught, or fancied she had caught, for in reality Sam was- not thinking of her legs at all, that particular look upon his face, made her anger leap up furiously against them both; against herself for forgetting to conceal her ankles, and against him for that unconscious flicker of coldblooded awareness that caused her to feel conscious of them. Her anger with Holy Sam, like her anger against her old idealised doll, made her totally forget that this dazed well-meaning man sitting up in such an absurd posture of forced attention, ^ith his heels under the chair and his head raised, was her romantic idol, and in one swift ungovernable impulse she seized him bv the hair of his head, and shook his skull with all her force backward and forward repeating those interrupted words: h'More about than any man . . . more about than any man . . ."' over and over again.