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Little did the more intelligent inhabitants of Gla tonbury realise what a happy life was lived by their Mayor. Mat Dekker pitied him for never taking any exercise (beyond his daily walks to and from the shop) and for not smoking a pipe. The young men in his employment pitied him profoundly, when they thought of him at all, for having no lady to flirt with by day and no lady to sleep with by night. Philip Crow pitied him for having no spirit, no initiative, no adventurousness, no River Axe and no airplane. Mrs. Philip Crow pitied him for having no Emma. Emma herself had announced once to Lily Rogers that of all the houses in Glastonbury that poor lonely Mr. Wollop's “was the unhome-liest she'd ever set eyes on, outside the workhouse.”

In his dealings with his fellow-citizens upon the town council the Mayor held his own very well. He did this by the enormous advantage he possessed over people who believed in the reality of thoughts and feelings. Sometimes when a thief or a liar came into conflict with him the offender was bewildered by the Mayor's penetration. In reality it was not penetration. It was common sense. But it was common sense of such prodigious proportions as utterly to confound the victim of its shrewd judgment. Mr. Wollop had only twice, in his life of sixty years, “taken,” as they say, “to his bed.” On these occasions he had been pitied by every gossip in the place. “Thik poor old gentleman, wi' his silver whiskies and his girt stummick, *a has no soul to care for 5en, whether 'a lives or dies!” The Vicar of Glastonbury had arrived, on one of these occasions, when the patient had a dangerous attack of pneumonia, to pay an official call upon the Mayor* It was Mat Dekker's notion that the hour had come for the man to think of his immortal soul. In place of such thoughts he found Mr. Wollop's placid countenance, his great silver whiskers extended on either side of the pillow, irradiated with absorbed interest in the movements of three wasps upon the ceiling. “They keep going round and round,” he told the Vicar; and the visitor was sadly aw*are that when he finally uttered the words, “In the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost,” the sick man was still rapt in interest in those three soulless insects.

For twTo whole days after the rainstorm that Cordelia had watched beginning, by the great oaks of Wick, the rain had fallen almost incessantly. Towards the close of the third day it began to show signs of clearing off; and about four o'clock, although it was getting so near tea-time, quite a number of people drifted into the draper's shop. Wollop's was well known all over that part of Somersetshire; and the business did not depend upon local patronage; but since the great, quiet, cavernous place had plenty of seats, both against its broad counters and otherwise, there wTere often quite a number of ladies, who knew one another well, chatting together there with their parcels in their hands. Since the old shop did not depend altogether on local trade, activity at Wollop's had the power of languishing without serious loss to its owner. But these idle hours hung heavily on the heads of many of the assistants. The older ones suffered the most. The younger assistants had so many thoughts of love, thoughts hidden away in that non-existing world which Mr. Wollop disregarded, and so much to tell each other about these thoughts, that they did not mind these interims of ebb-tides among the customers. The older assistants—and some of them had acquired a peculiar look, that Mary Crow told John Crow was the Wollop “grievance-look”—not having love-affairs to share, were wont to have the meanest, bitterest, most indurated quarrels among themselves that existed in all Glastonbury. Mr. Wollop being occupied with the apparitional world was certainly not oblivious of these seething recriminations, for Mary's “grievance-look” was quite apparent; but he must have accepted it as a mysterious ultimate, just as he accepted the fact that Tor Hill was opposite Chalice Hill, and regarded its cause as belonging to that world of non-existent essences which a sensible man ruled out of court. On this particular afternoon Mr. Wollop was seated serenely (as he always was) on a polished swivel-chair in a small iron cage. He had bought this cage from a bankrupt bank in Taunton, bought it at an auction for next to nothing. No living person except the Mayor and Bert Cole would have been as much interested in a man-cage as in a bird-cage. But Mr. Wollop, casting his Bert-like eye round the auction-room, had been agreeably struck by this object, and had promptly bought it. That he bought it for no sinister purpose was soon obvious; for the person he put into it was himself. The Mayor's shop-assistants, especially the younger ones, seemed to have the privilege oi wandering all over the place; but once in his cage for the day, the Mayor himself never came out except at such times as nature compelled him to do so. His lunch was brought to him in the cage.

Close to the great man's retreat, a day or two after Cordelia's visit to Chalice Hill, while in his contentment Mr. Wollop was murmuring over his accounts like an amiable sea-elephant, there sat on a stool at one of the counters none other than Mary Crow, She had come to buy a tablecloth for John's room in Northload Street. As the young man who waited upon her was the young man who took hair-wash for his appearance and “Neetchky” for his conscience, it may be believed that the buying of this simple thing was a slow business. The young man and Mary Crow differed in every point of taste and choice where tablecloths were concerned.

“Have you heard the news, Miss Mary?” These words came from the cage. The Mayor was addressing his customer.

“How do you do, Mr. Wollop! I hope you've been well lately?”

“Some folks in this town, Miss Mary,” the man in the cage went on, “are so solicitous for my health that they've decided on my retirement from public life.”

“Pardon me—no! Oh no! I don't like that at all.” This was addressed to the young man, who promptly went off, whistling. “Pardon me, Mr. Wollop, did you say your retirement? I don't quite understand.”

“These folks want for me to stop being Mayor,” explained the caged man. “They want for me to turn into a Hex-Mayor.”

“Why I thought you were Mayor for life, Mr, Wollop,” cried Mary sympathetically.

He shook his head; and then in a lowered voice, bending down towards her so that his forehead touched the bars of his cage— “It's that Mr. Geard who's to be the Mayor instead of me, so that I can keep my good 'ealth hunimpeded.”

Mary had no> need to pretend her astonishment at this. She was genuinely amazed. “I can't believe it, Mr. Wollop. Surely it isn't true! The councilmen elect the Mayor, don't they? They'd never, never elect Mr. Geard instead of you!”

“That's what they Ye going to do. I can see it as plain as a map, Miss Mary.”

“But it's a shame! It's a scandalous shame! Why everybody in Wessex knows the Mayor of Glastonbury. Why! Weren't you Chairman of that grand Public Meeting when the Bishop bought the Ruins for the Church?”

“It's what they're going to do, Miss Mary.”

"But Cousin Philip is on the council, isn't he?5*

“Only as one among the rest, Miss Mary. And though I don't want—” he lowered his voice to a penetrating whisper—“though I don't want to be a Halarmist, what with 'is trouble with 'is workmen and one thing and the other, I'm afraid Mr. Crow is not altogether the Hinfluence in the Borough that he once was.”

“But , . . Mr. Wollop------” she stopped in sudden consternation, remembering John's close association with Mr. Wollop's rival "But, Mr. Wollop, my cousin, John Crow, would have told me about this if there'd been anything in it. He's working for Mr. Geard now over this tiresome Midsummer Fair they're getting up, and he's never told me a word/'

The Mayor of Glastonbury permitted a broad smile to flicker across his face. He pulled back his head from the bars and stretched out his cramped legs as far as they would go. '“People don't tell people everything, Miss Mary, even when they are engaged to be married.”

The word “married” came as a second authentic shock to the sympathetic young lady. She had never guessed that the gossip about her and John had gone so far as to reach the ears of the Mayor. Obstinately she returned to the main issue of the discussion. “They would never do it! They would never dare to do it!”

“The Liberal and the Labour councilmen, Miss Mary, if they vote with these Bolsheviki, 'ave the majority, and if the majority says so, so it has to be.”

The sleek-haired young man now returned with a great pile of tablecloths over his arm. Mary impulsively got up and approaching the cage thrust her arm through the little aperture in front of it. “I can only tell you, Mr. Wollop,” she said, “that whatever John thinks, or is bound nowr to say he thinks, / shall always think of you as the Mayor of Glastonbury!”

The white whiskers bowed low over the outstretched hand. For a second Mary had the wild fancy that he was going to kiss it; but instead of that he shook it vigorously. “I expect I'll see you next week, Miss Mary,” he said, “at Mrs. Philip's tea-party. Look after Miss Crow well, Booty!”

This remark from his employer had become really necessary; for on her return to her seat at the counter Mary found such an array of highly coloured tablecloths, all after the taste of Mr. Booty and none after her own, that her difficulty recommenced with accumulated weight. She bought something at last, however; and nodding to the Mayor walked away with her parcel down the central aisle of the shop. The “Wollop grievance-look”' had left most of the faces she passed, for the clock was moving round towards closing time, but the smell of the place, that peculiar smell of rent fabric, especially of rent-linen fabric, sank like a thin, delicate dust into her nostrils, into her throat, into her consciousness.

“I'm glad I don't work here yet/5 she thought, ”but if Miss Drew turns me out, when Fm married to John, I swear I'll ask the old chap to let me come to him. I could sell tablecloths, anyway, better than that conceited boy." Once on the pavement she hesitated as to whether she had time to take John's tablecloth to his rooms in Northload Street before returning to tea with Miss Drew. Pondering on this point she remained in front ox Wollop's shop staring into the window. It happened that the light fell in such a way upon the window-glass as to throw back a reflexion of her face. Mary was startled at its pallor and its haggardness. How many weeks had she been looking like that?

“Girls ought not to have anything to do when they're i love,” she thought. “They ought to be let off everything!”

She turned away now from her reflexion in the shop window. “I'll just leave this parcel with the landlady,” she said to herself. John was not expecting to see her today at all. She assumed he was spending all his time today with Mr. Geard. “No; I won't go up those stairs,” she thought. “I'll leave this with the woman.” She hurried down the street, turned to the right by St. John's Church, followed the railings of the cattle-market, turned to the left down George Street, and finally arrived at the door of number fifteen, Northload. She could not find the landlady. Always present when she would have given anything for the woman not to be there, today when she wanted her she was nowhere to be seen. Nor were there any neighbours around. Over the whole of number fifteen hung a sinister and unnatural silence. The street door was wide open, and just inside it was the landlady's door; but all was silent, forbidding, desolate. Three times she rang the bell. Not a sound! She went back upon the doorstep and rang the outside bell. Not a sound!

“Well, I'll just run up and leave it outside,” she said to herself and began ascending the stairs. What was her astonishment when she heard voices up there while she paused to take breath, on,the first landing. At the top of the second flight she could catch actual words. She stopped there hesitating. Yes! He had someone in there with him; and she knew who it was too! It was Tom Barter. She stood for a second, resting herself, with her parcel propped upon the balustrade. She did not pause there to listen; she paused because she felt unable to enter and equally unable to go away. It was one of the most wretched moments of her life in these last agitating weeks.

“Fm going to make a little money,” she heard Barter say, “and then I'm going to clear out of this blasted hole. That was what Mary and I used to do all the time when we were so thick. We used to curse these bloody superstitions! It's all a fake. It's only to draw visitors. Your precious boss, Geard, is the greatest humbug of all. But of course you know that! You're out for making a little money, just as I am; and then, Holy Moses! you'll do a bunk just as I shall!” There was a sound of shuffled chairs and the clatter of china. Mary Crow became suddenly conscious that her attitude to Glastonburv had changed of late. It was Tom Barter she hated now, not Glastonbury.

John's voice uttered the next words, and they did not improve matters. “Where on earth has she put my whiskey?*' she heard him cry. ”Oh, I wish to God women wouldn't always tidy things up!"

Then came Barters voice again. As far as she could catch his words he seemed to be criticising John's biscuits: those Huntley and Palmer biscuits that she had bought with such care a week ago! “It's just as if it were a rough-and-tumble undergraduate's room in Oxford,” she thought. Yes, Tom was criticising her biscuits. He was strewing her rug with them too, no doubt, and trampling them into it! They had now apparently found the whiskey and were hunting for glasses. Then ensued more clatter and more half-humorous and half-peevish groans. Then when they had seated themselves again, still worse ensued.

“Don't be later than nine, Tom, will you?” she heard John say. “And I'll get another bottle of this when the pub's open again. If they're funny, where you live, about your coming in late, you can sleep here with me. I've got a double bed.”

She was unable to catch Tom's reply to this, but presently her whole frame stiffened and a cold shiver ran through her.

“I suppose Mary's often told you what friends we were,” she heard Tom Barter say.

John's voice was a little indistinct. “Something of the sort,” she thought she heard him murmur.

“I ought perhaps to tell you that I got so fond of her,” went on Tom Barter, “that I once even spoke about our being married. I suppose she never told you that, did she?”