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There was a liberal supply of thin bread and butter, and Tossie had cut it so carefully that even the lady who had Emma for a servant looked at these two great Dresden platefuls wiih arrested attention. But the rock cakes were the most darin<* innovation, most Glastonbury hostesses priding themselves upon not having to go outside their own kitchens for the replenishing of their tea-tables. This bold departure from the norm proved, however, a great success.

“No,” Tilly was saying to an enquiry from Mr. Dekker about the rhubarb in her garden. “I cannot say that I like the look of it this year as much as I did last year. It is redder than last year of course. I admit that. But my cook always prefers the stalks that have green streaks mixed with the red. She says they are more succulent.”

“They are not so sweet, Madam; they are not so sweet,” affirmed Mat Dekker.

“But my cook has her own way of handling rhubarb,”' reiterated Tilly, her black eyes shining. In her mind she resolved to have a whole morning, presently, entirely devoted to making rhubarb jam. The question was what sort of brandy to use for the fastening up of the jam-pots. As she watched Mr. Dekker's watch-chain and wondered how soon a crumb of rock cake would dislodge itself from between one of its links and one of the good man's waistcoat buttons—Tilly longed to brush him then and there—she recalled how she used to stand for hours in the kitchen watching her grandmother tie up jam-pots. The smell of brandy always made her think of a certain blue apron she had liked wearing in those days, not because it made her look pretty, but because it made her look grown-up and competent “Always use the best, Dearie,” the old woman had been wont to say to her hypnotised companion. And little Tilly had vowed to herself that whatever might be her future destiny she would never use, like her slipshod mother did, in the making up of jam-pots, anything but the best brandy. And this vow Tilly had rigorously kept ever since.

“No, it wasn't exactly yellow from where I saw it.”

Philip had been talking dogmatically about yesterday's weather and the timid poet had been aroused to assert himself when he heard Philip who had gone to Bath in his airplane— driven now by a pilot from London—praising the sky for its yellowness. “It was green when I saw it,” he cried eagerly. “And that's by far the most beautiful kind of sky. I call it the fields of the sky.”

Philip stared at the lad. He was in the middle of telling them all about his flight to Bath. The colour of the sky was of minor importance.

“What you say, young man, interests me very much,” said Mr. Dekker. “Most of us don't give enough attention to these things. When I kept a diary at college------”

“Talking of diaries,” interrupted Tilly, “I wish all of you men would begin ordering diaries at Wollop's! That impertinent young man there—you know the one I mean, Aunt?— won't keep diaries. He says there's no demand for them.”

Aunt Elizabeth burst into a peal of delicious silvery laughter. She did not often laugh. But when she did her laughter was like the clearest of rippling streams.

“Why are you so amused, Aunt?” enquired Tilly; but in no vexed or aggrieved voice. Now that Aunt Elizabeth had a house of her own she felt very friendly to her.

“Do you keep a diary, Tilly?” asked Miss Elizabeth.

“Oh, dear no! What do you suppose? It's for my cook. You don't know my cook, Lady Rachel. Her name is Emma.”

“You don't mean to say that Emma keeps a diary?” threw in Mr. Dekker with a chuckle.

“Tilly!” The way Philip uttered these two syllables was a masterpiece in rich psychological nuances. In the first place his tone protected his wife from Aunt Elizabeth and from all these strangers. In the second place his tone warned his wife that there were proper limits to this fashion of hers of giving herself away. In the third place his tone expressed an indulgent appreciation, a tender recognition, that Tilly was Tilly, and that she was the kind of thing in a person's life that he himself was glad to possess; though it might seem strange, and even absurd, to others!

“No, no,” said Tilly quietly, quite unperturbed at being laughed at by Emma's favourite clergyman, “she doesn't want them for that. She wants them to keep accounts in. The ordinary tradesmen's books don't suit Emma. She has her own ways of keeping accounts.”

“My new pilot's name is Tankerville,” said Philip suddenly, seeing in his mind that bird's-eye view of his Dye-Works which had made it impossible for him to be sure whether the skv was green or yellow.

In the general silence that followed this irrelevant observation Lady Rachel remarked that her father would never have a servant whose name was more than one syllable. But Philip's mind had wandered far away from Bob Tankerville. He was saying to himself, "I shan't replace Barter for a while. I shall wail a bit. Those office-lads seem able to scramble on somehow. Yes. I shall wait a little, and get a tight hand on all the reins myself. What I've got to do now is to give Geard more rope—give him all the rope he wants—while I egg him on by talk of the Law. Hell hang himself—if he has rope enough!''

“Seen any otters down your way at Middlezoy this year?” said Mr. Dekker to Ned Athling, whose shyness was so intense in this pause of the conversation he had commenced licking his lips with his tongue just as dogs do when they feel embarrassed. He now glanced quickly and nervously at Lady Rachel.

“No,” he replied with a blush. “I mean,” he went on. “that I wouldn't say if I had.” Everyone looked at him and his colour deepened.

“Oh, I won't tell Will, Ned!” cried Rachel, reading his thoughts.

“I wasn't ... I wasn't only thinking of him” he blurted out: and then, with a gallant effort to give the conversation a new turn, “I was telling the Mayor that he ought to hire a real pantomime clown for his show, and have some mummers like they did in the old days.”

“He wants to keep it all for the local talent, doesn't he?” said Rachel.

“Those professionals are the best though,” went on Athling, while Tilly fixed a nervous eye upon her husband. “To have a real professional, of the sort Dan Leno was, bred up in the theatre or the circus, and to let him play his part like one of those old mummers or mountebanks . . . don't you think,” he spoke hesitatingly, diffidently, brokenly, “don't you think . . . there would be something ... in that kind of thing? I haven't got it quite clear . • . but I seem to see in my mind a sort of Passion Play—with—” he spoke more eagerly and rapidly now, as he warmed to the subject, “with a real pantomime clown of the Leno tradition—improvising wild Rabelaisian 'gags' . . . like the Fool in Lear . . . while Our Lord is before Caiaphas or before Pilate . • . don't you think there's something in that? The Mayor caught my idea, I think—though whether------”

Philip restrained himself with creditable self-control under this imaginative tirade. .He thought in his heart—“This is the only kind of thing our young England is interested in, and it's absolutely futile. It's not only futile, it's destructive. A Dan Leno introduced into a Mystery Play of the Crucifixion—that is exactly the sort of thing that would appeal to this new generation! They are never happy until they've given everything—even Religion—an uncomfortable, ironic, disillusioned twist.”

Lady Rachel had been watching her friend with a mixture of pride and bewilderment. Her nature was too direct to be altogether satisfied by something as bizarre as a modern clown at the Crucifixion, but she liked to see Mr. Crow nonplussed and Mr. Dekker confused. Their hostess had to come to the rescue of her nephew.

“You've put off your spring cleaning, Tilly, I hear?” she said.

Mrs. Philip Crow fidgetted in her seat and looked reproachfully at her aunt. To interpolate a matter of such primary importance as spring cleaning into this bagatelle about clowns and crucifixions seemed to her mind a sort of wilful outrage to the bed-rock of human seriousness.

“Of course not,” Tilly rapped out, “but Philip may have to take a holiday when this troublesome strike and this tiresome pageant are settled, and Emma and I have been thinking that the carpets in the front-rooms had betLer wait until------”

Lady Rachel gave her a quick glance of appreciation. Why, this little lady, with the beady black eyes, really was like a child who had got a doll's house to play with! “I wonder,” she thought, “what she'd make of the way the Bellamys manage these things at Mark's Court?”

Ned Athling had begun to grow very restless. He tried not to stare reproachfully at Lady Rachel. Miss Crow's enamelled tray, with its bowl of primroses so carefully interspersed with their heavy green leaves, was the ritual centre of this group of people. The Vicar's gold watch-chain, Philip's fawn-coloured tie. and the gay dresses of the three ladies would have lacked their mirror of platonic essences had the tray been carried off. Athling tried to concentrate his attention upon this tray.

“I sometimes think,” said Mr. Dekker. “that we don't realise half enough the influence wTe all have upon the personality of our town. Don't you feel, Elizabeth, that Glastonbury has a most definite personality of its own?”

Ned's timid eyes under their pale eyebrows gleamed at th? clergyman's words but he felt shy of asserting himself again.

“I know a place that's got twice as much of what you call personality than this town has,” remarked Philip. “Tell us!” cried Rachel. “Tell us, Mr. Crow!” “Wookey Hole!” he announced emphatically, crossing his legs in their neat heather-tinted trousers and surveying with satisfaction his unwrinkled brown socks. “Wookey Hole has more real character in its prehistoric stalactites than all your Ruins.”

In the silence that followed this remark Miss Crow, who was shepherding her little party with as much care as Emma's father in the Mendips ever guided his flock down to the washing-pool, took the opportunity of handing to Rachel and Ned a veritable May-Day nosegay. She noticed Philip turn to the Vicar and ask him for sympathy about Wookey Hole. She noticed that her new cat, a big stray tabby that Tossie had christened Tiger, had come in. as Tossie went out, and had jumped upon Tilly's lap. Tilly was now absorbed in this cat. She had been watching it ever since it entered, hoping against hope that she wrould be the preferred one in winning its favour, and now this had happened she was in bliss. So Miss Crow turned to the lovers.

“I want you to take Lady Rachel to Chalice Hill, this afternoon, Mr. Athling,” she said. “There was an antiquary down here yesterday—not the one who found the Edgar Chapel by the help of that spirit, but quite a different one—and he unearthed a stone up there, somewhere to the west of the hill, so they tell me, and near Bulwarks Lane, which has completely puzzled him, You might tell me what your opinion of that stone is, Mr. Athling. At any rate, I'd like you to see it before you begin your long drive home. And I want you to have a bite of supper with us, too, before you start.”

Rachel's cheeks flamed with pleasure at this, and Mr. Athling met his hostess' eyes without blinking and smiled with childish gratitude.

It was a shame that Tossie had left the room too soon to hear this. As it was, it had been with a deep sigh for the presence of her friend that she had returned to the kitchen without the tray. She could hardly bear to look at the bluebells on the table now, so greatly did she long to tell their absent donor all about what was going on in the drawing-room.

“You don't mind my speaking freely to you, Dekker, do you?” Philip was now saying. “But it really won't do; it simply worit do for you to mix yourself up, and your position and everything, with this man Geard. The man's a rascal. That's the long and short of it. He's an extremely cunning rogue and an arrant charlatan. He'd like to play the part of a sort of Abbot in this town. This Pageant of his, or pious circus, or whatever it may be, is getting to be a nuisance. You were saying, weren't you, Aunt Elizabeth, that you've been worried by these endless notices from that little fool, John? Geard must learn that in these days to be Mayor of a town like ours means nothing at all. This, and that money he got from my grandfather, seem to have turned his head. He's begun to encroach on your domain, Dekker—hasn't he?—with all these rehearsals that I hear are going on.”

Lady Rachel glanced quickly at her young farmer, but it was impossible to stop him.

“I like Mr. Geard,” he said, with a rush of hot blood to his face. “I think he's done a great deal for Glastonbury. I think this Pageant will bring a lot of people here.” He stopped abruptly and glanced apologetically at his hostess. “From abroad,” he added, “Germans especially.”

Philip glanced at Tilly, but she was oblivious to everything except the cat on her lap. He then sought to exchange with Mat Dekker the particular look with which older people condone the impetuosity of youth.

“The most important thing for any town nowadays,” he said calmly, looking not at Athling but al his aunt, *:is to give the populace constant employment. That is not done by Pageants. Is it, Aunt Elizabeth?"'

“What about the municipal factory. Sir?” threw in young Athling.

''May I ask if you have seen that concern?" said Philip.

“Seen it? No . . . Yes ... I mean Fve been to their new shop in George Street and bought some . . . some little things.”

“May we hear what things, Mr. Athling?”

“Charming things!” broke in Rachel. "I've got lots of them in my room upstairs/'

“I'm glad you Ye found something, Lady Rachel, among their toys, that thrills you so much, but I'm afraid Mr. Dekker will agree with me that the men employed in making those toys are being rapidly unfitted for any properly paid job. They hardly give 'em enough to live upon. I expect you did not know that, Mr. Athling.”

“They're going to let me design some figures for them, Mr. Crow,” said Rachel irrelevantly.

“Who is?” enquired Philip.

“Mr. Barter,” the girl answered.

“Barter!” Philip brought out these two syllables as if he had been King James referring to Guy Fawkes. “I suppose you've heard, Dekker, the inside story of that man's leaving me? It had to do with------” He stopped abruptly remembering that the victim in the story had just been handing him those rock cakes he had enjoyed so much. “Well, at all events,” he went on, lowering his voice a little, out of respect to Lady Rachel if not to Tossie, “Barter, as we know him, isn't exactly the sort of person that any concern would be proud of. I've never heard, eitlier, that he knows very much about the manufacturing of toys. You can't do these things in that sort of slipshod, amateur, arts-and-crafts way.”