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The watery sun which struggled into Old Jones' shop, through what portion of the window was not obscured by these objects, enabled Sam to watch every movement of Mr. Evans.

The man was standing on tiptoe against a shelf and struggling to open a little china pot which stood there without removing a marble paperweight which rested on its lid.

Sam got hesitatingly up from his seat; but remained with his hand on its arm. There was something distressing, teasing to the nerves, something that set one's teeth on edge, about Mr. Evans" effort to get his fingers into this little oblong pot.

“Ah!” he ejaculated at last, “I feel it now. Ah!”

Sam had never seen the human form stretched to such tension as was the form of Mr. Evans with his fingers in that small receptacle. He couldn't help looking at the man's bare heels, both of which were protruding now, as his feet rose out of his slippers, through large round holes in his knitted socks. His feet came back into their shoes as he uttered this exclaimation, and he himself turned with a tiny key in his hand.

“Come,” he said. “Come . . . come . . . come!”

He led the way to the back of the shop where on the opposite side to the narrow staircase going up was a still narrower staircase going down. At the top of this he paused; and taking a candlestick from a little bracket began fumbling awkwardly with a matchbox.

His helpless struggles with all these inanimate objects had now got on Sam's nerves to such a pitch that he rushed forward to assist him. Between them the tiny key fell upon the floor. Sam picked it up and handed it to him. A faint stream of sunlight from the window, full of little wavering motes, fell upon Mr. Evans' countenance, as, with the key clutched in the palm of his hand, he at last managed to light the candle. Sam was shocked by the nervous trouble upon the man's face. Was it due only to the obduracy of all these little teasing inanimates, vexing like demons the movements of a philosopher? Or was his request for these books the most ill-advised demand with which he could have come upon him?

Once more he had an opportunity of studying Mr. Evans' back as he followed him down that dark little staircase. The lifted candle the man carried caused that hooked nose of his, as he turned to warn Sam of a particular step, to become like the nose of an extremely old miser visiting his hoard of ducats and guilders. The one eye too, which was all Sam could see in that shadowy profile, as he went down after him, was like the eye of a demented goshawk. *

They reached the cellar at last. It was small enough. It was tidier than the shop above. It was a little low room lined with tall book-shelves. Sam saw at once that most of the books were of no interest to him. They were almost all of them ancient magazines bound in leather covers and interspersed with tattered school editions of the classics. One shelf, however, had glass over it; and it was to a key-hole in this glass door that Mr. Evans applied his little key.

What was the matter now with the man? His legs were shaking. His knees were knocking together! His fingers must have been shaking too; for the candle grease began dripping over the front of the glass case as he tried to open it with his key.

Sam stepped forward and made as if he would take the candle from him. His gesture was a very natural one under the circumstances. Why then did the Welshman turn upon him a look of contorted fury? But the latter got the glass doors open finally; and Sam, peering over his shoulder, surveyed the exposed books. They were indeed “theological” works! Sam had never seen so many parchment-covered and vellum-covered and leather-covered folios. He read the names. There were Bonaventura, and Duns Scotus, and Thomas Aquinas, and Albertus Magnus, and Avi-cenna, and Bernard, and Jerome, and Anselm.

Sam could not restrain a weary, disappointed groan. What good were these to him?' He was no scholar. What he wanted was something—well! He really didn't know exactly what he hud wanted; for in the world of theological books Sam had the simple imagination of a student of minnows and butterflies.

But he saw Mr. Evans' hand now hurriedly withdrawn from the shelf with a beautifully bound book clutched in his fingers. There was a big gap where he had just removed this work and another book, that had been standing erect by the one he had taken, toppled sideways now across this gap, and lay there diagonally, resting against some thick mediaeval tome with an obscure Latin title. Towards this book Sam's attention was at once attracted, for it was different in appearance from the rest. His sharp, observant bear's eyes caught its title in a second. It was called “The Unpardonable Sin.”

Mr. Evans now turned upon him hurriedly.

“Here's the one for your purposes,” he said, emphasising the “your.” “They didn't teach you at Corpus to read Church-Latin I'm afraid,” he went on. “But this is the 'Confessions' in English . . . the best modern edition . . . it's worth twenty pounds . . . I don't know how Jones ever picked it up.”

He was beginning to close the glass doors again when Sam made a motion towards the book fallen across the gap. Mr. Evans jerked his arm away but in such a manner as to make it appear that he did so by accident. He might have done it by accident; for nere he was, fumbling as helplessly as ever, with his precious key!

Sam had grown really impatient by this time—Saint Augustine's “Confessions”! Why his father had got that book on a shelf that Sam had known from his childhood, side by side, not with 'The Unpardonable Sin,“ but with Bewick's ”Birds." Whatever it had been that he had in his mind when he came here this morning it certainly had not been Saint Augustine. No! It had been just a vague craving to make one more attempt to find some possible attitude, less sceptical than the one he had grown to adopt, towards his father's creed.

He felt indignant with Mr. Evans for rousing his hopes like that and then presenting him with undecipherable parchment-folios and with “The Unpardonable Sin.”

But he hadn't lived cheek by jowl with a priest of God for nothing. He had wit enough to know now why Mr. Evans' knees had knocked together! Either that book was some monstrous Aphrodisiac of Obscenities or it was some pseudo-Biblical fantasy that had turned, or was in process of turning, this poor lonely devil's head. But what was the astonishing fellow doing now? Mr. Evans had put down his candle upon the floor and was on his knees by a carved chest, on the top of which was something tied up in brown paper. The man was cursing under his breath as he tugged at a knot in the string of this large flat parcel.

Sam received the impression that he was under the guidance of a non-human puppet, for whom the least attempt to cope with the obstinacy of matter was an impossible task.

But Mr. Evans summoned him now to his side. He had completely recovered his equilibrium. He was once again the long-winded antiquary.

“Merlinus Ambrosianus,” Sam proceeded to spell out from the cover of the large volume now presented to his view.

“Is this your own make-up?” he asked, using a word that his foster-mother Penny might have used.

“You mean my own composition?” said Mr. Evans, turning to his interlocutor the bland, bewiidered, blinking face of a harmless Dominie Sampson.

“Oh, no! My Vita Merlird, when it is finished—I have only just begun my collection of notes—will include elaborate details of the Magician's life that this blundering idiot here does not seem even aware exist. Oh, no! This is a reprint of an eighteenth-century compendium of excerpts from the Bodleian. It has certain documents that they won't let you take out of the Bodleian. For instance, it has the famous Pontyprid version of the disappearance of Merlin; proving conclusively that the Turnir.- Cuttle called Carbonek was not at Bardsey, but here at G:oi »nlv4;:-, : probably on what you people call Chalice Hill; but it is :i.,t a:; important book. I would never have purchased it it ihose Oxford fools—they are worse at Oxford than at Cambridge—hadn't sot suspicious of me. I don't know why it is. Mr. Dekker”—he n,n\ scrambled to his feet and Sam was relieved to see that he relinquished all attempt to tie up those strings again—“but I set*m to excite suspicion when I go about. It's something to do with m\ appearance. I don't inspire confidence.”

He stretched himself up to his full height as he spoke. He had re-possessed himself of the candle and also of the volume of Saint Augustine, worth twenty pounds. He now rose and fell in his loose slippers as if performing some species of gymnastic exercise.

“Have you any idea why it is? Is it my nose, do you think?”

He lifted his hand, apparently quite forgetting that it held the candle, towards this feature of his face; and as he did so he smiled at Sam with such an ingenious, Don Quixote kind of smile, that Sam felt singularly disarmed.

But Mr. Evans shook his head whimsically and hugging the big volume of Saint Augustine and carrying his candle, he led the wTay up the stairs, back into the shop.

“Well, I must be off, I suppose,” murmured Sam vaguely. “I certainly can't afford twenty pounds.” After a pause he added rather sadly: “I can't afford twenty shillings.”

“I'll lend you the book,” cried Mr. Evans. “You'll never find another edition as pleasant to read; and if you haven't read it lately you'll get a lot out of it. It's an interesting book; only rather morbid. But you are morbid yourself, just as I am! I should think it would rather suit you.”

Sam remained, for what seemed to him an interminable time, staring at the back of the Punchinello pepper-box in the window.

Mr. Evans was engaged in one of his perennial struggles with the inanimate. He was wrapping up the Saint Augustine in cardboard boards, making as he did so such facial contortions as would have been extravagant in a wrestling bout.

When the Welshman at last handed him the parcel, Sam remarked nervously, “Are you very busy this morning, Mr. Evans?”

Number Two's representative looked at him in surprise.

“Not especially.” he said.

“I only asked you,” wavered Sam, laying his fingers on the shop-door handle, “because my father wanted me to go to the station to see your friend Crow, who's sending round all these queer announcements. He's sent you a lot, no doubt.”

Mr. Evans nodded. “You want me to go with you?” he asked.

“I thought it would be nice,” returned Sam.

“All right. Why not?” said Mr. Evans. “I've got nothing to do but lock the door! People don't often drop in in the mornings.”

When the two men reached the little office, down by the station, they found John preparing to sally forth on a private expedition of his own. It was difficult to catch his explanation of the purport of this expedition, because the wooden shanty he occupied was invaded at that moment by a violent outpouring of steam from the engine of a luggage-train that had stopped close behind it.

Geard's office having been the temporary office of a coal company and consequently situated in the goods-yard of the Great Western station, it had been to the accompaniment of the day-long shunting of trucks and puffing of engines that John Crow had composed his extravagant advertisement of their Midsummer Pageant.

As the three men stood together now at the door of the little office, Sam was unable to avoid a sidelong glance at the majestic proportions and almost personal dignity of the great green engine towering above them. The vast Creature carried its name in clear gold letters upon its belly. It was called “Sedgemoor.” It may well be imagined how the appearance of this particular word, in so unexpected a place, gave to all these polished pistons and cog wheels a symbolic significance to the enamoured heart of Sam!

Just for the sake of that word “Sedgemoor” there floated—like the “disarrayed” Loveliness that so tantalised Spenser's stern Sir Guyon—the white limbs and the tender bosom of Nell, in and out of the iron entrails of this majestic monster.

“I've got to go to Tor Field,” John Crow was saying, “before I can get on with my next sot uf <¦ uvular?. I must see the lie of the land. Why don't you two come with me.' At any rate as far as the Vicarage? I don't want to drag \ou any further; but if 11 be easier to talk if we get away from here.”

Sam and Mr. Evans both signified their willingness to accompany him.

“I really came,”' said Sam, with a disarming candour, uas my father's plenipotentiary. He's read your first batch of circulars and he's anxious to know more about the whole business. You mustn't think it's just impertinent interfering; but my father could really be an immense help to you if he got interested and liked your ideas—as I'm sure he would!"

“Well, I'll tell you how far we've got,” said John, "and then you'll have something definite to tell your father. I ought to have called on him about it long ago and asked his advice, before it got as far as it has. Mr. Geard wanted me to. But these last days have slipped by with such speed that I don't seem to have had time for anything.

“What we propose,” he went on, as they all three walked slowly up Benedict Street, “is to have a mixed entertainment. Part of it will be just an ordinary Fair, like what you have here, at Michaelmas, only more lively, I hope! Part of it, though, will be quite different from that. We propose to have”—he peered craftily and furtively into the faces of his companions—“a Glas-tonbury Passion Play.”

John had a suspicion in his Isle-of-Ely mind that the words “Passion Play” would excite annoyance in both these men. He forgot the indelible egoism of human beings! Because his own head was just then so full of this scheme of Geard's, it seemed to him that the mere mention of it would arrest lively attention, and evoke either hostility or sympathy. He was not prepared for casual indifference. But casual indifference, tempered by politeness, was precisely what his grand news received.

Sam's brain was full of Nell and of his struggle with his own passion.

Mr. Evan's head was full of the sinister thoughts which his visit to that bookshelf had stirred up.

Thus John's mentioning the historic Passion of Jesus passed as lightly over both their heads as if he had been referring to a famine in China.

Twice on their walk through the town, from Benedict Street to Chilkwell Street, Mr. Evans was on the point of leaving them and going back to his shop. When they passed the Vicarage gate in Silver Street, Sam was on the verge of bidding them good-bye.