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Miss Crow looked at 'him with surprise. There had stolen into his affectedly genteel intonation a vibration of such authentic emotion that it startled her. She didn't repeat that clicking of her tongue. She allowed her umbrella to lie still, its handle between her knees. She forgot the sinister palpitations of her heart.

“Your mother who?”

“Who taught me what liberty really meant. Who made me an anarchist, lady!”

“But you don't mean to say------”

“Stop, Miss Crow! I know what's coming! You're going to talk about throwing bombs and killing innocent people. No, no. My mother didn't teach me how to throw bombs. What she taught me was—what every woman knows in her heart!—that all these man-made institutions only get in the way of real life and have nothing to do with it. It's the policeman in our minds, Miss Crow, that stops us all from being ourselves and letting other people be themselves.”

He stopped to take breath and found that he was gesticulating furiously with his free hand right in front of Miss Crow's face, and that Miss Crow had shut her eyes tight, as if she were in the process of being shampooed, and that in his eagerness he actually had emitted a small globule of white sputum which now adhered to the black frill of Miss Crow's maternal but maidenly bosom.

Around this anarchistic spittle, a minute yellowish fly, attracted by the smell of humanity and dreaming perhaps that one of the old-fcshioned Glastonbury markets was about to commence, hovered with pulsing and heaving desire.

Paul Trent drew out his elegant pocket-handkerchief torn hia breast-pocket, and therewith wiped his forehead. Then he hesitated for a minute. He would dearly have liked to have wiped away that little bubble from his too voluble mouth which still adhered in annoying prominence to the lady's bosom, but he simply had not the courage to attempt such a deed. It is easier to defy society than to outrage a small propriety; and the man from what Malory calls the country of the Surluse, and what Sir John Rhys calls the Sorlingues, or Les Isles Lointaines, replaced his dainty handkerchief in his breast-pocket and sank back in his place, with an inward sigh and an outward smile. “No good!” he thought to himself, and a wave of bitter futility swept over him.

During the last four or five weeks he had come to feel as hos* tile to Glastonbury as any one of the Crows had ever felt. He would have hated the town as much as Tom Baiter did, if it had not been for this unique chance of giving an anarchical twist to the policies of the tiny commune. But he had encountered disillusionment after disillusionment.

Simple and direct as Dave Spear's methods were compared with his, the young Communist defeated him every time their ideas clashed. The cause of this was obvious. Dave had a clear-cut set of adamantine principles, which he combined with a practical and even unscrupulous opportunism that was a perpetual surprise to everyone.

Thus when the dictators of this microscopic slate came to loggerheads, it was always the Anarchist whose principles were vague and his practice unbending, who was forced to yield; while the Communist, whose principles were crystal-clear and his practice malleable and flexible, carried the point. Had Paul Trent been more sympathetic to the Mayor's mysticism he might have won Mr. Ceard over to his view. Had he been more personal in his deslructiveness, he might have propitiated the emotional Red and plotted with his help some catastrophic blow to Philip's dye works, or tin mine, or bridge, or road, these wedges of capitalism in this co-operative community; but the truth was that Paul Trent, like the poet Shelley, was far too ideal in his instincts for his inslincts to prevail; and in a world where liberty and independence and sweet reasonableness are forced to yield to fanaticism and dominating faith, his curious double nature, wherein his mother's masculine soul concealed in his father's effeminate body, divided his energy and confused his purpose, it was easier for him to outwil the Marquis of P. than to turn Glastonbury into a voluntary association of free philosophers. As he now jumped up from Miss Crow's side, made his courtly Carthaginian obeisance and cleared off, directing his steps towards the central offices of the commune, which were in the upper floors of the AJbbot's Tribunal, he said to himself that his real difficulty was with the wayward and emotional nature of the Glastonbury natives themselves. “And it's the same,” he thought, "with Spear and old Geard; yes! and even with the double-dyed fool Robinson.

“Our little society can deal easily enough with these pilgrims and visitors. We can grow rich upon them; and we can make them obey our rules or keep them out by our requisitions. It's the natives who'll break this thing up, when it is broken up; and I don't give it more than a couple of years, at the best! Yes, it's the natives who'll ruin the whole thing!”

Thus he pondered; and to the same tune and to the same moan had Avallach and Arthur, Alfred and Edmund, Dunstan and Edgar, Whiting and Monmouth, yes, and Mr. Recorder King! all pondered in their day and in their hour.

He paused for a moment at the gate of the Tribunal, just as Mary Crow had once done and gazed with a sad, disenchanted eye upon that beautiful late-gothic facade.

“Does it need a brute like Judge Jeffreys,” he thought, “or does it need a saint like St. Joseph, or like this crazy Sam Dekker, to deal with these Glastonbury autochthones? Old Geard can handle them when he wants to; but he never seems to want to. God knows where that old charlatan's mind is carrying him now. Not to the building up of any possible community that / can visualise!”

His hand was upon the handle of the Tribunal's main entrance when two little girls—one of them carrying a sturdy child in her arms—passed close by him.

“Bert can say 'Glastonbury be a commune,' Bert can; just like teacher tells we to,” said the little girl who was carrying the child.

“C . . . 0 . . . M . . . com—U . . . N . . . E . . . port . . . commoon!” murmured Bert proudly, from the arms of a still prouder Sis.

But Morgan Nelly, as usual, dashed this simple glory into a thousand melancholy pieces, to be carried away on an obscure wind. “Glaston baint no such thing,” she cried in her shrill, mocking elf-voice. “Glaston be a person, like I be, and persons can't be spelt by no teacher, nor taught by no teacher. 'Twere Mad Bet who told I that Glaston were a person and I arst Holy Sam if such 'un were, and 5a said, 'Sure-Zie, girlie, sure-Zfe. Glaston be the 'Ooman of Sorrows what holds Christ in lap!'” The children passed on, out of the gloomy triumvir's hearing; but, though anything save superstitious, the young lawyer from Les Isles Lointaines found it hard not to regard Morgan Nelly's curious remark as a significant omen. He gazed down the street at the massive, pinnacled tower of St. John's. It was certainly a peculiar day for lights and shadows! A soft, elusive, fluctuating radiance Lhat seemed contained within a delicate sub-aqueous vapour, at once faintly rose-tinged and faintly greenish, hovered like the submerged lamp of a drowned ship, over the roofs and masonry of the ancient town.

Glastonbury a person? Well, perhaps, after all, that was the solution of their troubles! These old, obstinate, irrational indigenes of the place understood this wayward and mysterious Personality better than any philosophical triumvirate could do, and had expressed their feeling through the mouth of this wild-eyed child!

But if this was the solution, was not he, the man from Malory's Surluse, nearer to the secret than the rest? Or was it, after all, a mistake to make even the wilfulness and the irrationality of Persons into a principle and a doctrine? Was old Geard, in the long run, the one who was the wisest of them all; he for whom all these exciting events were only half-real, the dreams of an absent-minded Wayfarer, “drunk upon the milk” of an unseen Paradise?

The young Anarchist found it difficult to break up this indefinable spell into which Morgan Nelly's casual words had flung him.

He knew so well the trim, prim, fussily orderly look of the communal offices above his head where the depersonalised mind of his colleague Dave dominated the very typing machines and the very postage stamps; making everything seem like those scissored patterns in paper, from which patient seamstresses cut .their garments! Why was it that the real reality of life always struck a person sideways and incidentally, and seemed just the very thing that no one allowed for?

What Paul Trent felt just then was a dim suspicion that if everybody in Glastonbury—these difficult natives as well as these easy visitors—were only to stop doing anything at all, just stop and listen, just stop and grow porous, something far more important than a "Voluntary Association of Free Spirits'' would reveal itself!

A feeling stole over him as if all the way down its long history Glastonbury, the Feminine Person, like Mary at the feet of the Master, had been waiting for the fuss to cease, for the voices to subside, for the dust to sink down.

As when a boy catches upon the face of a girl, as when a man catches upon the face of a woman, that unique feminine look which forever is waiting, watching, listening, dreaming, in a trance of mindless passivity for something that never quite comes, so Paul Trent felt himself now to be watching the Glastonbury atmosphere, on this day of such strange lights and shadows.

Could it be possible that the secret of ecstatic human happiness only arrived, when all outward machinery of life was suspended, all practical activity held in abeyance? Man must live, of course, and children must be born of women; but was there not something else, something more important than any conceivable organisation for these great necessary ends?

A doubt came into Paul Trent's mind, different from any he had ever felt, as to whether his inmost ideal—this thing that corresponded to the word liberty—was enough to live by. Wasn't it only the gap, the space, the vacuum, the hollow and empty no-man's land, into which the fleeting nameless essence could flow and abide? He felt as if he were on the edge of some thrilling secret, as this thought, this doubt, touched him with its breath. It was as if all the moments of dark, cool, lovely, quiet emptiness that had come to the generations of men living in Glastonbury, had incarnated themselves in this Feminine Emanation of the place, which now seemed brushing him with its overshadowing wings.

Comrade Spear wanted to “liquidate” the Grail Quest on be tialJt of Communism, Red Robinson wanted to destroy it because of the treacheries and oppressions it had condoned. He himself had wanted to shake it off, as a morbid, mediaeval superstition, hurtful to free spirits, like a clammy miasma! And all this while Old Geard was working his miracles by its aid; but casually, carelessly, almost indifferently; as if he had discovered that the whole Grail Quest were a mere by-product of some vast planetary reservoir of an unknown force.

Oh, dear! His thoughts had become too analytical, too concrete ; and his good moment was gone. With a shrug of his shoulders he turned the handle, entered the Tribunal, and ran upstairs to the orderly rooms from which Glastonbury was now ruled.

When Mr. Evans arrived at his shop after his interview with Miss Crow by the railings of the Cattle Market he found his partner, Mr. Jones, extremely excited by the quantity of foreigners there were that day in the town, and bent upon devoting the whole day to a lively concentration upon their business.

“I know better than thee can know what these Continentals require, seeing as I've lived in Glaston afore thee was born,” persisted the old man, “and the best thing thee can do is to bring up a pile of they books out of basement and put 'em in windy. Them Germans and Rooshians be more for books than they be for bricky-brack.”

Mr. Evans struggled out of his tight overcoat, making portentous grimaces as he pulled at its sleeves, hung it up on a nail at the back of the shop and rubbing his face with both his hands, prepared to do what his partner bade him. He had taken good care since his marriage to avoid that descent into his Avernus but the human mind is so constructed that when he received this point-blank push from his business confederate, a hundred reasons sprang up like a hundred sly lawyers, each of them full of subtle arguments why he should do what the old man bade him to do. This was the third little breeze that had helped forward that day his gulf-stream of evil!

His high spirits that morning had been largely due to the fact that he had just arrived, m his Life of Merlin, at the beginning of the final scene where the Magician passes into that state of Being hinted at in the mysterious word Esplumeoir.

Mr. Evans had been writing, of late, every evening in their small sitting-room in the Edmund's Hill district above Bove Town. He would sit on a little chair that creaked under his bony figure in front of a flimsy table, covered wilh publications of various antiquarian and folklore societies, and as he stared at a cheap coloured print in a variegated frame, of a river and a boat and a woman reading—a print that took the heart out of all rivers and all boats and all women!—he would give himself up lo the exquisite and sweet pain of weighing every word he was writing, changing it, re-setting it, substituting another, replacing the first, till the particular sort of rhythm he aimed at had at last been caught.

A boat ... a river ... a woman reading . . . this incredibly feeble production, in which the blotchy frame and the sentimental picture seemed to melt into each other till they became a weak blur of meaningless twists and curves, had grown to be so dear, so sweet, so familiar to Mr. Evans, whose aesthetic taste was nil, that it not only reminded him of a picture in his parents' farm but it also associated itself with the word Esplumeoir. It was under the spell of this entirely worthless,-but to him almost sacred object that Mr. Evans was now considering and weighing in his mind two simple sentences: “And so in the wet vapour that hung in woeful water-drops upon his beard he bowed himself down and stooped right low over the rain-soaked earth where yesterday had been the drawbridge of Caer Sidi. The Dolorous Blow had fallen: the Spear of Longinus had done its work; where was he now to hide his forehead and cover his eyelids, who knew too well the causes of all these happenings; their echoes, their ripples, their waxing and waning moons?”