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Once out in that lovely June evening—it was now only a few minutes after eight—he strolled into the town. In the open space outside St. John's he encountered Mr. Stilly, the cashier of the Glastonbury bank. Mr. Stilly had himself come out after an early supper—he was a hard-working man of forty who supported a pair of aged parents—to take the air, walk the streets a little, and see what was toward. Mr. Stilly had thin-, reddish hair, a still thinner, reddish mustache, and a drooping, melancholic face. But he was not really a melancholy man. Mr. Stilly accepted the pin-pricks of chance and the joltings of time and tide with patient equanimity. He concealed a passion for taking photographs beneath his unruffled demeanour and he was also extremely fond of using a fret-saw. He adored his parents, who were both exacting and tyrannical; and, one of the greatest pleasures of his life was when at this time of the year he went down to the brooks so that the old people might have watercress to their tea. Mr. Stilly had unbounded respect for Philip Crow. When he found himself tonight overtaken by this gentleman his tendency was at once without question to nod to him politely and sheer off. It was with surprise—and even with some misgiving—that Mr. Stilly heard Mr. Crow express a wish that he would accompany him to Tor Field to have a glance at what might be going on out there, on this fine night of the second of June. Mr, Stilly, conscious that he had left his “only father and his only mother,” as he was accustomed facetiously to call them, playing at dominoes, acceded to the manufacturer's suggestion.

The two men walked rapidly down Chilkwell Street, past the Vicarage Gate, past Miss Drew's gate, past the Tithe Barn, from which the symbolic creatures of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John regarded them without an eyelid's flicker, past St. Michael's Inn, where Mad Bet made silent faces at them, past Chalice Well where the red water gurgled at them in disregarded neglect, till they came to Tor Field. The gate was open and they went in. It was just like the field of any ordinary Fair, this place tonight, with sail-cloth barriers pegged firmly into the earth and a confusion of lively voices reaching them through the warm twilight. They skirted the barrier and standing behind a crowd of casual intruders, whom the Players had no authority to exclude, they surveyed, with the distasting wonder of grown-up people in the presence of childish nonsense, the bewildering chaos of the unusual scene.

Mr. Stilly opened his mouth twice to utter some suitable comment before he had the courage to speak. Then he said: “It makes one think of what one reads about America.”

“What do you mean?” asked Philip. This nalural but not very kind question disturbed the play of Mr. Stilly's already agitated intelligence.

“They perform . . . performances ... a good deal . . . don't they ... in the . . . open air?” muttered the cashier of the bank.

“Do they?” said the other, laconically. “I was never there.”

Mr. Stilly murmured something about Indians and sank into nervous silence. To be standing at this hour with the owner of the Glastonbury Dye-Works and in the presence of such an unusual scene was too much for him. He hoped that his parents had not yet noticed the length of his absence.

It was apparent that it would not be for lack of varied and fantastic costumes or of contradictory and vehement directions, or of excitable crowds of emotional young people, that the Geard Pageant would fail, if it did fail. Philip glared at it all with a cold, pinched disdain from beneath his cloth cap. There shot forth into the hurly-burly of that motley assembly, from this man's concentrated detachment, radiated waves of accumulated contempt. His angry thoughts pursued one another through his brain like marching soldiers. They came and went; thev wheeled and counter-wheeled; they obeyed the commands of Philip's will in much better order than these excitable lads and lasses were obeying their distracted Professionals fr

“Humanity!”' he thought. “As they were two. three, four thousand years ago, so today! To mould them, to drill them, to dominate them—it's all too sickeningly easy.” And he thought: “How much more worthy a resistance is offered to me by the deep, dark, interior rocks of the Mendips! How much better to struggle with machinery against the inertness of blind matter than to try to make anything of such insects! It won't be necessary to plot and scheme to defeat Geard. All I shall have to do will be to hold off my hands. This crazy confusion, these bewildered people; these bare legs and riotous dancing, why! it's a Bacchanalian orgy. He'll make the town a laughing-stock. The thing he's stirring up here—any fool can see it—is pure religious madness under the mask of theatricals. The man's a lunatic. This sort of thing never has been, and never will be, tolerated in England.”

“I'm afraid I've got to go now, Mr. Crow. I didn't expect to stay out so long. My . . . my people will be wondering where . . . where I am.” It had taken Mr. Stilly a long time to make up his mind to utter this daring ultimatum. His voice when he did utter it wTas like the voice of an unhappy school-boy murmuring something about cricket or football to a preoccupied headmaster absorbed in a nice point of Thucydidean grammar.

“Eh? What did you say? Oh, all right,” returned Philip. “Wait one minute, Stilly, and I'll walk back with you.”

They left the field, passing on their way out that fallen trunk on the mossy sides of which Sam Dekker had searched for rare toadstools on the day when Mr. Evans first thought of taking the part of Christ in the pageant.

Meanwhile this same Sam, struggling pitifully with his love for Nell, had entered his favourite shrine in Glastonbury. This was a little chapel dedicated to St. Patrick lying behind the Women's Almshouse near the entrance to the Ruins, a chapel which still possessed an original stone altar left undisturbed by the Protestant Reformation and carried upon its wall the heraldic arms of St. Joseph, a green cross between two golden cruets.

Never had those Arimathean arms, never had that stone altar, beheld a worshipper such as poor Sam showed himself that night.

He was on his knees at the altar. He was alone in the little chapel. Lower and lower he bowed his head, clenching his fingers as he bent forward.

But it was not in the attitude of prayer that his hands hung by his side. They swung there savagely in the manner of a prizefighter's fists and, as they swung, the backs of his knuckles kept striking against the front of the stone altar.

There was something about his posture as he knelt—swaying his whole body backward and forward—that was pitiably grotesque. An imaginative observer might have received the impression that an animal was praying.

Was there any portion of Sam's nature that exulted in the atrocious task that he had laid upon himself—the task of doing not his will but what he conceived to be the will of a tragic superhuman Being?

Yes, the soul itself, in this grotesque swaying body with clenched fists, exulted in what it was doing! Sam's soul seemed to be able to gather to itself a peculiar consciousness quite apart from the rest of Sam's sensibility. His soul seemed to be holding his body and his will in a tight leash, as a man might hold a wild-eyed bull, by a ring through its nose.

His soul seemed to be saying to his natural senses and his natural will: “You must go through this because Christ went through it! I care not how you suffer; so long as you go on,, day by day, doing His will and not your own!”

And all the while Sam suffered there, swaying in his anguish like a great bleeding animal held by a steel ring through his nose, the Man-God that he invoked was struggling in vain to reach the consciousness of this mad perverter of His secret. In vain! In vain! Against the power-lust in the soul of a man, when it has once tasted the wild delight of taking up its own body and its own will and its own nervous sensibility and forcing them to act against the grain, there is only one Deity that can prevail: and that Deity is not Christ. How could Christ as He swept now like a cloud of weed-smoke under the door of St. Patrick's chapel, relax the tension of this soul, that pulled and jerked so remorselessly at the nose of a praying earth-beast?

But Christ was not, on that vaporous Glastonbury afternoon, oblivious of His poor, besotted servant Sam. Although He tried in vain to change by invisible reasoning the incorrigible obstinacv of Sam's perverted mind^ upon external events He could exercise a certain degree of control.

He now put it into the head of young Elphin Cantle, with whom Sam used sometimes to go for walks, to come surreptitiously into the church. Elphin, like many other boys of the town, had a passionate love of Sam. Mother Legge, when in her cups, had recently said to Young Tewsy that Sam Dekker had become a seducer of boys. Nothing could have been more pathetically unjust I Sam did not in his secret heart, care at all for boys. His walks with the oddest, queerest, and most unhandsome among them—and Elphin was certainly one of these— were part of his general scheme of life. He knew that there were lots of boys in Glastonbury who, hating cricket and football and not caring for girls, were profoundly lonely and unhappy. To these boys he gave a good deal of his attention, which they repaid tenfold, as far as emotional response was concerned; but Sam knew nothing of the strength of the feelings he excited.

When Elphin peeped into St. Patrick's chapel he wTas thrilled but not surprised to find Sam there. He had looked in before, under similar occasions; but had never dared to approach the object of his passionate adoration. Today, however, pushed forward by the invisible pressure of a Hand upon his shoulder, the thin-legged, pale-faced boy moved shyly up to his idol's side. As he approached, he fancied he caught the sound of a huskily drawn sob in the man's throat. This sound hurt him to the quick. Well did Elphin Cantle know what it was to go into solitary places and utter sounds like that!

The boy went close up to him and still pushed forward by the invisible Hand, whispered his name, doing as he whispered it, what Russian serfs in former times did to their masters, that is to say, kissing him lightly on the shoulder. Anyone but a born naturalist like Sam would have started violently and even uttered a cry; but long training in the woods and fields had given Sam under any nervous shock—and indeed in all these things his nerves were like tough wood—the poise of a Red Indian.

“Oh, it's you, Elf, is it?” was all he said. And he began rising stiffly to his feet, unceremoniously wiping his eyes with the back of one of his relaxed fists.

Elphin Cantle said not a word.

“Had your tea yet?” enquired Sam, stretching himself and looking round for his cap and stick.

Elphin shook his head.

"Come on then. Let's see what Penny has got for us today !'

THE PAGEANT

Midsummer Day dawned long before most of the per-formers destined to take their share in Mr. Geard’s religious circus had awakened from sleep. Mary Crow, however, who was to take no part in it save as a spectator, was awake soon after the first glimmer of dawn.

To watch the processes of dawn from a window that faces ivest is in a sense like the contemplation of various excited expressions crossing a human countenance when the cause of such feelings is absent. The girl propped herself up in bed, reached for her dressing-gown which was at her bed's foot, wound it like a shawl round her neck, and watched the slow, stealthy expanding of the grey light. She remembered having heard John once defend the Biblical account of the creation, when Tom Barter criticised it as separating the creation of the sun from the creation of light. John had maintained that light was an entity quite independent of its immediate origin. Certainly it did look to Mary now as if light were an entity free of all connection with the sun.

She could see the great ruined Tower Arch of the Abbey Church as she lay there, and she could see the tops of the elm trees beyond it, very ghostly and phantom-like, their greenness only half-born. The arch, it seemed, assimilated itself to this dawn-light far less easily than the treetops. It isolated itself in some way from this process of dawn and emphasised its own curves and mouldings and masonry, in resistance, as it were, to these atmospheric effects. But the foliage of the treetops was part of it The foliage of the treetops, as Mary wTatched it now, seemed to contain within itself the infinite sadness of this grey, half-born, Cimmerian light that was now slowly invading the world and establishing itself in the cold aisles and in the blank corridors of darkness.^Filmy wisps of grey mist hung about these treetops, mist that was liker to dewdrops than raindrops and yet did not really suggest water-drops at all. Nor did it suggest clouds! They were things by themselves, sui generis, those dawn-mists, and they seemed to have as remote a connection with water in any localised form, as the dim light, in which they dropped and wavered and rose and sank, had with the invisible sun. “Yes,” thought Mary, “something in the foliage of those trees flows forth to greet this sad light, that does not seem like sunlight, just as something in me flows out to greet it.”

Will it be fine today? That was the next thought that Mary had. She had been to the Northload Street room for a few minutes yesterday evening and had found John and Tom together. They were drinking whiskey and the former was in a state of complete exhaustion. John had told her that the Mayor was resolved to carry the affair through, wet or fine, but that he had somehow convinced himself—“You know the way he talks to his God, as if He were standing by his side?”—that it would not be “allowed” to rain on this day of “Glaston Re-surgens.” Mary felt full of doubt and anxiety. All manner ot troubling thoughts assailed her. Suppose the whole thing were a monstrous failure? Suppose the performers got panic-stricken and that French clown lost his head in some wild antic or improvisation quite out of keeping with the rest? She had seen a fragment of the Passion Play rehearsed and she felt totally unable to conceive how Mr. Evans could even carry his part off, far less be successful in it. Rumours had been running wildly through the town 'for the last week about the police from Taunton interfering and arresting the principal players, and the last thing Mary had heard before she went to bed last night was news brought into the kitchen by Weatherwax that the expected strike in the Dye-Works had come and that the Glastonbury factory had locked out all its hancls that morning. So far, the gardener's story said, the trouble had not extended to the Crow plant at Wookey, but that also, so Weatherwax declared, might have a lockout tomorrow. Even the Wookey hands had demanded, and apparently had been given, a holiday today, so that as Mary lay propped up on her pillows, waiting for the first yellow beams to strike the great broken arch in front of her, she seemed to catch trouble on the air, coming from every side. Barter had told her that the town was already filled to overflowing with visitors. Parties of Germans, Dutchmen, Scandinavians—even a few French people—had filled the streets yesterday. She herself "had heen startled by the crowds as she went to Northload Street.