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Her words ran on with a lively fluency, but to both of them at that moment they were like the sound of the ripples of the river of fate, on whose calm tide they were being irrevocably carried forward. Behind her words she was thinking to herself, 'It's nearly lialf-past live. It'll soon be dark. I must be alone to think what I'm going to do. 1 would . . . like ... to give . . . him ... a surprise ... a sort of ... . celebration . . . of this day/* And behind listening to her words—which, to confess the truth, interested him very little—Sam was thinking—“I'm the luckiest man in all Somersetshire. How beautiful she is, that exquisite Being over there . . . and she's my girl! Yes, you old Sam, you've got a real girl of your very own and one that's worthy to be the pet of princes!”

Slowly, then, she too got up upon her feet. “Sam, darling,” she said. “I want to be alone for a little, to collect my thoughts and get things straight. I'm going to get you a nice tea, too, a real high tea, such as I know Penny gets for you and your father. Where did you have your lunch, Sam?”

He stared at her. “Lunch?” he murmured. “They went . . . they said ... I told them . . . yes,” he said, “I believe I could eat something presently. Do you want me to go out for a little while, Nell? Is that what you mean?”

As soon as she found that he had caught the drift of her wishes, though still in complete darkness as to her mood, she became calm, competent, radiant. “Run off then, my dear,” she said, opening the door for him, “and give me an hour, will you? Have you got your watch?” She gave him a quick, unimpassioned, practical kiss as he went out; but the minute she had shut the door on him she fell on her knees in front of the fire and clasped her hands together in an ecstasy of gratitude to the gods.

Nell now realized, for the first time, how completely her heart belonged to Sam; and with this knowledge all outside things became comparatively unimportant. The portentous figure of her husband loomed, indeed, like a distant mountain range upon the background of her thoughts; but the present hour seemed to be hers with such an absolute benediction, that no fears, no doubts, about the future could assail or spoil it. Yes, she would give herself to Sam; now that at last he had come to her. All the mo-™ ments that she had endured alone, since Zoyland had gone to Wookey, gathered now, like an airy squadron of strong-winged birds, to push her forward to this consummation. To let this chance go by unlaken would be to betray, through weakness and feebleness, the very stride of fate itself.

The first tiling she did was to look at the clock to see exactly how much time she had at her disposal. “He'll be away just as long as I said/' she thought. ”Poor old Sam, what a shame to send him of?!“” Then she retreated into her kitchen and hurriedly filled her kettle with fresh water for their tea, transferring what water there was already in the kettle into an enamelled saucepan for the boiling of their eggs. She glanced then at the fire in her sitting-room to make sure that her lover had not spoiled the glowing redness of it by his absent-minded putting on of more wood. “Ill make the toast the last thing!” she thought, and returning again into her kitchen she cut up half a loaf into neat slices of bread. She then set to work with rapid, deft fingers to lay the table. This proceeding, swift though it was, gave her as deep a satisfaction as Sam's father was wont to derive from his preparations for the Sacrament. She did not precisely think, as she put a teaspoon in each of their two saucers and an egg-spoon by each of their two egg-cups, how over all this darkening quarter of the planet, female forms of the same love-demented race wTere doing just this same thing at this same moment. But she was fully aware of a delicious atmosphere of romantic sensuality in what she did. Their more dangerous passion hovered like an invisible incense round the sugar-bowl, the slop-basin, the milk-jug, and round all these little silver spoons, some with the great Zoyland Falcon and some with her own Spear crest upon them! She proceeded then to set light in her parlour to candles, bringing a veritable illumination of them from every other part of the house to throw lustre upon her love-feast.

The expression on her face when all this had been done and when she had finally placed two chairs opposite each other, on either side of the little card-table covered with a white cloth, was of the kind that only one of the great early masters could have done justice to. Its dominant note was an earthy, irrational, almost stupid complacency; a complacency that doubtless derived, in a long atavistic retrogression, from aeons of passive, brooding female contemplation of the imperishable elements of continuity in the turbid torrent of life! Leaning for a while against the back of the chair she intended for Sam. she allowed herself to fall into the waking trance of a very young girl. Zoyland had destroyed her physical virginity: but he had not touched—no, not so much as ruffled—that virginal dream-state in a young girl's consciousness wherein she awaits her first lover; and the bloom of which she keeps, like a handful of soft, white swan's-down, or dandelion-seed, to lull the sleep of Eros when he really does at last come to her and pitch his tent.

The clock on her mantelpiece now struck the half-Iiour from when she had sent Sam away: and she had other things to do. Leaving the table she stared long and long at the sofa where they had been sitting together. This sofa had no back. It was, in fact, a large-sized, single-bed couch, standing against the wall of the room. With shining eyes she ran upstairs and came down with a great armful of fresh bed-clothes, snatched from her linen-chest. These she stretched out carefully upon the couch, tucking them in between it and the wall. With the gleam in the eyes and the quiver on the lips of one mischievous young girl making sport of another, she brought down, after a second run upstairs, a single pillow and a single pillow-case. When all was ready and she had made the bed she cast the same stupidly happy stare upon this achievement. The next thing she did was to give an anxious glance at the clock and then run upstairs for her final act of preparation. It was almost dark outside the window nowT; and she had carried downstairs every available candlestick. But her personal preparations were of such classic simplicity that they could be done perfectly well in this grey, perishing light. She kept both the door at the top of her stairs and the door at the bottom wide open, so that up there in her bedroom the dying light of the natural day and the ritualistic light of her Fete d9Amour mingled together with that peculiar and mysterious charm which candlelight and daylight assume when they are associated with each other at either of the two twilights.

Once more she ran downstairs, and filling a small hot-water can from her enamelled saucepan, which had by this time begun to steam a little, she hurried back to her twilit chamber, poured out the water into her basin and stripping herself with eager fingers of every shred of clothing set to work to sponge her bare, soft skin from L^ad to foot. She felt, as she did :h:s. as :t hcr ilesh and blood were something eiuiieh apart from th? deep t*:n -

sciousness wherewith she loved her lover. It v/as js ii her bedr__

after the tea-table and the bed—were a sort of final cud triumphant offering, the last and the dearest thing she ccald give lo him, so that he might take his full pleasure on that sacred nlxhl'. Violently she rubbed herself after this, all over, with her Lath-towel, till her limbs glowed warm and sweet: and then puliir.g on stockings, slippers, and a night-dress she had never ^orn before, she threw over herself a long. warm, dark-blue dressing-gown. Snatching up her brush and comb she now descended to her illuminated sitting-room, where, by an old-fashioned mirror, she combed out her hair, and then fastened it back, much more carefully than she had ever done in her life before. She removed carefully the strands of her hair adhering to the comb: and as she threw them into the fire she remembered what an old nurse of her mother's had once told her—not her childhood's nurse, but a very old woman who used to stay with the Spears when she was a little girl—that if a girl's hair makes a sound as it burns— a sound that the girl herself can hear—she will lose her maidenhood within the year. “Mine's gone already,” she thought, “but not really I”

She was ready for him now; and behold! as she looked at the clock the hour she had given him was all but five minutes used up! She looked anxiously at her bright array of burning candles. Then she looked at herself, in her blue dressing-gown, in the mirror. For a passing second she got a real thrill of pleasure from the shining eyes and bright cheeks which she saw reflected; but a sudden memory of one evening when she had been waiting for Zoyland swept over her and she turned hastily away.

Meanwhile Sam had been walking slowly through the twilight in the same direction as that from which he had come. He was conscious of a vague feeling of fertility in the damp spring air and of the hidden stirrings of vegetable juices in roots and stalks as his feet sank in the soft turf of the river-bank, where thick swaths of last year's grass, lying along the ground and trodden by the feet of cattle, were interspersed with patches of young spring shoots and with the immature foliage of yarrow and bed straw. He feit, as he walked along, that life was at once far more exciting and far more dangerous than he had ever suspected. The freedom of conscience with which he had twice kissed Nell this afternoon, giving full rein to his feelings, was not threatened, even now, by any moral scruple. His heavy, sluggish nature, once roused to the magic of sex, had so little that was vicious in it—in the sense of being isolated and detached from tenderness and pity—that it brought with it no sense of guilt. It justified itself: and he feit pure and simple exultation in it. The strange thing was—and as the twilight darkened about him this was what he found hard to understand in himself—that the renunciation of all “possessiveness,” which was his new7 ideal, did not debar him from snatching at this chance-given moment of love. The real reason was that Sam's devotion to Nell—as his unique true-love—was so unqualified and heart-whole, that his feeling, at this heaven-sent moment, did not carry with it that sense of “taking” which he had set himself to renounce. To love Nell, now that he felt she really loved him, seemed to him quite as much a giving as a taking. What did a little trouble him, as he burst through the river-mists and dug his heels and his stick into that magnetic springtime soil, was the quivering sxultation of his own mood. Life seemed to him, just then, almost too exciting, almost too charged with electric dangers and raptures. Sam was no coward, but he was essentially a slow-moving, slow-witted, timid animal. The even tenor of his ways, until Nell appeared, had been so unruffled and so solidly earthy, that he felt scared at this new7 riot in his nerves, at this new quicksilver, running like an unknown “perilous stuff” through every vein! As he strode blindly on in the grey dampness he actually dared to articulate that word “saint” that wTas carried in the remotest portion of his consciousness. “I will be a lover and a saint!” his heart cried.

He never afterward forgot that hour's walk by the side of Whitelake stream. Carried along upon the cresting wave of his delicious adventure what Sam resembled most nearly was a boy who has “run away to sea”; and who suddenly finds himself in the midst of an overwhelming predicament; a predicament which realizes at the same time all his desire to be “heroic,” and all his craving for romance. At the bottom of his nature Sam had no small modicum of phlegmatic common sense: and in the very whirl and splash of the adventure to which he was responding, he retained a certain background of bewildered surprise that it should be himself—the timid, plodding, unenterprising self he knew so well—that had been given such a disturbing privilege! Compared with what Nell was feeling at this moment of time, Sam's emotions were pathetically youthful. The Don Quixote in him had been stirred. But that was really the onlv thing in him upon which the girl could lean. For the rest he was in a mood of such turbulent bewilderment that the occasion with all it brought wTas only half-real to him. In most love-affairs between men and women this element of “reality” is unequally distributed; but in this case it was especially so; for whereas every aspect of what was happening was vividly clear to Nell, to Sam it was all wrapped in a vague mist. Not exactly in an idealistic mist, however; for the sly Quantock fox in him kept up all the time a sniffing scrutiny of what was going on! NelFs wThole being, on the contrary, wTas melted into “realism,” on tins momentous night. Everything was twice as real to her as usually was the case; and things were always real enough. While Sam kept thinking to himself—“What a puzzling confusion life is! Here am I, longing to be a saint and yet with a chance of spending the night with the sweetest girl in Somersetshire!”—Nell thought simply and solely, “I want to give everything I've got to Sam. He has come to me at last. He has come to me at last!”

When Sam paused at last, close by Whitelake Bridge, and lit a match to look at his watch, he saw that he had already allowed forty minutes to pass since he had left the house. This vexed him; for he could hardly traverse in twenty minutes fields that had taken him forty minutes to cross. His chin began to work as he put his watch away and he cursed himself for his absent-minded blundering. The moment he swung round, however, he noticed a faint, dim, filmy light in the western sky. He knew at once what that sign hung in the heavens was—the young moon! The mist from the river, and the still more insidious vapours wafted across Queen's Sedgemoor, so obscured this fragmentary luminary that it was no bright object that he stared at. He was standing almost due east of Whitelake Cottage now; so that this dim white blur in the darkness hung directly over the dwelling of his Love. To his excited feelings at that moment that phantasmal object seemed much more than a natural phenomenon. Eagerly he grasped with one of his hands a tuft of willow sprigs growing out of the head of an old bowed pollard, whose roots were in the wet earth at his feet- and leaning forward raised his stick exultantly in the air. The dark earth beneath him seemed to him then like a vast, wild-maned horse, upon whose broad back he was being borne through space! A poignant smell of musk rose up from where his hea^y boots pressed against that huge living creature. Young plants of common water mint must have been growing there to cause this scent: but its aromatic sweetness added yet another element to his enchantment.