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There arose at that instant such a curious hubbub at the back of the room that the three Aldermen leaned forward from the edge of their chairs and craned their necks to see round the speaker's back and under the speaker's armpits what it was that caused the disturbance. When the worthy men did realise what was the cause of the confusion, they gazed at one another and at the back of Mr. Bishop in sheer dumbfounded stupor. The people in the front of the audience beg£m themselves turning round now, and some among them when they realised what was occurring began to raise that hoarse, grating susurration which indicates, to any experienced speaker, the complete impossibility of receiving a quiet hearing.

“I therefore call upon Mr. Crow,” went on the old Town Clerk,

“to------” John Crow, who was on his feet now and facing the

back of the room, realised in a flash the bitter humour—as far as he was concerned—of what had occurred, but his first feeling was one of indescribable relief. He felt like a hunted fox, with all the pack at his heels, who unexpectedly finds a hole—and a hole with a second exit! When Mr. Bishop told him he would have to speak he had had a spasm of sick terror and had come near to flatly refusing. Then he had thought: “After all. why not? Geard will probably come in while I'm getting up steam. And there's nothing really to funk in these people!”

But now it wasn't Geard who had come, but Philip!

“I therefore call upon Mr. Crow-------” the Town Clerk had said, and some anonymous voice, in the crowd at the rear of the hall, had cried out “He's here! Mr. Crow be here!” and everyone who turned round saw Philip standing there, in the leather jacket of a flyer, motionless and with a grim smile on his face. ''He's here, Sir; Mr. Crow is here, Sir!" shouted a second voice.

Philip's contemptuous smile changed its nature in a moment. He threw down his leather cap, and stepped rapidly down the centre aisle towards the platform.

The three Aldermen, hypnotised by their inherited West-Country respect for the richest man of their town, rose from their chairs to welcome him. Mr. Bishop, who still stood by the speaker's table, murmured rather feebly: “I am sure that everyone here will be glad to learn if Mr. ... if Mt. Philip Crow has any opinions which he would care-------” But here his voice was drowned in a resounding and quite unpremeditated salvo of clapping.

Every audience, however hurriedly collected, quickly takes to itself a queer identity of its own and becomes a living organism whose reactions are as spontaneous and incalculable as those of a single human being. There had naturally arisen a certain obscure feeling against the newly elected Mayor for his non-appearance, a feeling that they had been fooled and cheated. This was combined with a hardly conscious sense that Geard, as a man risen from the ranks, demanded less consideration at their hands than the well-known manufacturer. Philip's unpopularity, too, was much more serious with the poorest and least educated in the town, an element that was hardly represented in the Tribunal tonight.

Thus when, encouraged by the applause with which he was greeted, Philip mounted the platform and advanced to the table, while Mr. Bishop and the three Aldermen sat down, there was given to him—in one of those psychological up-burstings of feeling to which the crowd-organism is subject—a terrific ovation, by far the most spontaneous he had ever received in Glastonbury. It may well be believed that it was the conservative Mr. Weatherwax —excited beyond all measure by the actual appearance of that “authority” he so greatly admired—who now lifted up his manly voice and shouted loudly: “Three cheers for Mr. Crow!”

The uproar that followed was deafening. When silence was at last obtained, Philip leaned forward across the table and made one of the cleverest political speeches of his life. When it was over, and Mr. Bishop rose to make a few polite comments, John whispered to Mary: "What a fellow he is! I hate him, but I can^t help being ... in some odd way . . . you know? . . . our old Norfolk blood . . . able to . . . assert itself still . . . and make . . . these fools ... sit up a bit!7'

Philip's hard, cold, clear voice was indeed ringing in the ears of everyone present. “And so,'' his final words had run, ”the best way to make our town the sort of place we would all be proud of living in is to make it independent of these precious visitors from Europe and America. A living wage for every man who wants to do a good honest day's work is what I am aiming at. Not old fairy stories but new factories is what / want to see; not fake-miracles but solid hard work; not fancy toys and mystical gibberish but smoking chimneys and well-filled larders! Let these visitors, when they come to Glastonbury, find in place of vague chatter about Chalice Hill a prosperous, independent community; a community that does not need to beg or dance or csing,' as the old song says, 'for its supper“; a community that can afford to hire its theatrical performances; a community that is too busy and too well-employed to have its head turned by crazy preachers and self-appointed Popes!”

-It is not contrary to the weakness of human nature to enjoy the spectacle of a crafty blow aimed at an absent adversary, but if it had not been for his audience's obscure sense that their dignity had been outraged by Mr. Geard's non-appearance, Philip's malicious words would not have had the effect they had. He was vociferously applauded as he sat down, and when, after Mr. Bishop's diplomatic closing of the meeting and after everyone had risen up to sing the first verse of “God save the King,” there was a general feeling in that audience's mind, intensified rather than diminished by the distant thunder—still unaccompanied by a single drop of rain—that a leader who allowed himself to be betrayed into deserting his post at so crucial a crisis had received no less than his due from this hawk-faced despot in a leather jacket, who advocated laborem et panem, rather than any kind of circenses, as his panacea for the ills of their town.

Thus in the criss-cross currents of this eventful April FooFs Day, dominated by “clouds without water,” Bloody Johnny and his ambiguous Grail received a Dolorous Blow from which it appeared possible that neither of them might recover. In that sequence of spiral recurrences—in which past events are eternally returning, but with momentous difference—the same psychological situation had been produced as when in those long-vanished mysterious days the wistful and audacious Balin wounded the Guardian of the Grail in both his thighs wTith the terrible Spear of Longinus.

Every person, as that motley audience left the Abbot's Tribunal, was conscious that something deep had been stirred up, ready to respond to Geard of Glastonbury's communication, and that this Something had been suppressed by the malice of superficial human nature, played upon by a practised hand. There was a feeling among them all as they went off as if they had stretched out their arms to grasp a Golden Bough and had been rewarded for their pains with a handful of dust.

It was with a queer, vague, irritated sense of uncomfortable remorse that they went home, with the murmur of that strange spring thunder in their ears that brought neither rain nor lightning. And as the night fell on the roofs of Glastonbury it was as if She Herself, the historic matrix of all these happenings, had been thwarted and fooled at the critical moment of her mystie response.

The generative nerve of Her body had descended into Her womb, but all to no purpose! Cold and hard and pragmatic, the words of the Norfolk iconoclast had cut off the consummation of Her desire. From the forlorn thorn stumps of Tom Chinnock's Terre Gastee at the foot of Wirral Hill the effects of this Dolorous

Blow seemed likely to spread over the whole psychic landscape. Let Her labor and let Her eat, but let the Stone of Merlin remain a stone, and the Fountain of Blood remain a chalybeate spring! When Mrs. Geard and her daughters reached Cardiff Villa that night they found the master of the house seated alone by the fire in the dining-room, with a glass of gin and water by his side. Above him on the mantelpiece lay, in its accustomed place, the little ornamental matchbox. From the water-closet window on the landing above he had heard the familiar lead-piping give itself to the night once more, with its wonted word—“the unessential shall swallow up the essential!” The well-worn doormat and the rusty scraper outside his door emanated the same spiritless and domesticated monotony. As all these things had looked before he went to Northwold, so they looked now, when, after extricating himself with characteristic phlegm and obstinate patience from a darkened Wookey Hole, he had come straight home to his empty house.

Ring Arthur's sford

1 HE FIRST HESITATING SPROUTINGS OF CHILLY, DUMB. T\ HITISH-

green vegetation had forced their way into the clear air and established themselves above ground. The mysteriously released saps and life-essences, faint, mute and fitful, had now risen high enough to fill the cold stiff stalks and fling a new smoothness and a new resilience into their upward-striving curves.

The early, perilously sweet blooms, such as those greenish-yellow calyxes of the first daffodils, catching the spouts and jets of the chilly sunshine from between the wind-tossed clouds, and bowing their wet petals to the brown earth under the heavy showers of rain, had given place to the far sturdier, if less poignant, growths of the later spring season. Tulips were now out by the edge of most of the Glastonbury lawns and the heavy waxen towers of the garden hyacinths—purple and pink and white and blue—had already passed their apogee of inebriating sweetness and were sinking down day by day into their rich death. The more innocent and more childlike scent of lilacs too was already on the air; and the renewal of the earth had even advanced far enough for the great drooping sprays of the laburnum trees in Mr. Weatherwax's two old gardens to be bursting out into delicate buds. Peonies also—those unrestricting, unwithholding orbs of lavish wholesomeness—were now to be seen in many warm parterres; while across the old masonry of the smaller gardens where bright-cheeked girls flitting in and out of their houses into the sunshine, like moving flowers themselves in their fresh Easter frocks, kept laughing and challenging one another as they heard that familiar sound, came on the southwest wind the mocking cry of the cuckoo.

Three weeks had slipped by since Sam Dekker had lain with Nell Zoyland upon that carefully prepared couch by the White-lake waters—three fecund weeks; and hours sweet as honey, and hours bitter as coloquintida, had slid down the same fatal slope into everlasting oblivion.

Glastonbury had the air, in that halcyon weather, of being Glastonbury here, layer by layer through the centuries, was revealed in certain significant petrifactions, certain frozen gestures of the flowing spirit of life, as it was caught up. waylaid, turned into silk, satin, brass, iron, wood, leather, silver, china, linen, pictured books, printed books, play utensils, kitchen utensils, timepieces, wine decanters, toys, traps, walking-slicks and weapons.

It was not an Aladdin's cave for children: and indeed about many of the objects, warming-pans and bird-cages and fire-dogs and so forth, there was something that suggested besotted and miserly old age rather than youth. But it was a treasure-trove for the type of imagination that loves to brood, a little sardonically and unfastidiously perhaps, upon the wayward whims and caprices of the human spirit.

Mr. Evans had even discovered—for Number Two's system of collecting curiosities was evidently rather philosophic than artistic—certain quaint objects, much more recent than the numerous antimacassars and artificial fruits under glass which he had selected, objects that the owner apparently thought significant of the age of his own early youth, such as rusty bicycle handles and tricycle wheels and parlour games like Lotto and Spelicans.

The thick, golden light seemed to reach the eyes through some indescribably rich medium, like old sherry wine, which hung above all this chaos. And it was as if it had gathered to itself some magical potency that particular morning.

Cordelia Geard, for all her new blue dress and over-ladylike hat, could not resist a queer sensation as she looked round the place as if she had entered a magician's cave, and had exposed herself to some unknown possibility of bodily transmutation. She felt as though Number Two's shop, in the same way as it could make mid-Victorian parlour games look like Roman antiquities, could transform a girl of the second decade of the twentieth century into some platonic symbol of erotic expectation- It had been the southwestern wind and the lilac-scented air that had brought her into her fiance's domain; but she had not suspected that this leaping up of life outside would be answered reciprocally among the littered simulacra inside! But as she stood waiting now, seeing no one and afraid of lifting her voice, she felt as if she were greeted in that sun-illumined space by a chorus of muted whispers. The carved knobs of an early-Victorian bed murmured extraordinary things to her. A blue vase with big white basket-work handles became still more voluble.

The girl in blue fixed a frowning glance upon this latter object.

“He must be upstairs making his bed,” she thought. “I would dearly like to make his bed for him!”

And then, gathering up all her forces into one terrific resolve, “I'll make him love me like other men love their women,” she said to herself. “Ill make him love me like Crummie makes Red and Mr. Barter love her. Women can do these things! Women can make themselves like tinder to a match, like filings to a magnet, like straw to a spark!”

Cordelia's dark eyes began to gather a strange, excited light as her heart went on telling her heart what she would do to rouse the desire of Mr. Evans on this Maundy Thursday morning. She set herself to listen intently; and she thought she did hear sounds; but oddly enough these faint sounds that she heard seemed to come from under her feet rather than from above her head and they resembled the scraping of a nervous heel against a bare board rather than the rustling of sheets on a bed.

Cordelia had never heard Mr. Evans refer to the chamber below stairs where reposed that curious volume—now separated from the Saint Augustine, its aforetime companion—that was such a danger to the Welshman's peace of mind; but she began to experience a vague sense of feminine uneasiness, totally without any rational cause, about her friend.