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“Think if I'd forgotten it!” he whispered. 'Think it we/d had to ring and bring that woman down!" And she remembered, as they ascended the two flights of stairs to their top floor, glancing with an almost guilty nervousness at the various doors they passed, how miserable she had been so many times, on these stairs. She recalled the day when she had bought the tablecloth at Wollop's and had found Tom there and came away without even knocking. As she followed John now with her hand on the gas-lit bannisters and watched the ends of his grey flannel trousers clinging about his down-trodden heels, she wondered to herself why it was that he loved her now so much more than during those wretched months before the Pageant. Was it Tom's fault in those days? or Geard's? or just the agitation of the Pageant?

“I don't understand him,” she said to herself, as they reached their own landing, “but I belong to him, I belong to him! He loves me more today than he's loved me since the boat on the Wissey.”

Her feelings were a thrilling mixture of contradictions when they stood in the room at last—alone together—and with the night before them. But they were all happy sensations; though so opposite! It was a delicious sense of a furtive, guilty assignation she had, as she heard him lock the door behind her. But it was also a heavenly sense, as she looked around her, of being in a room she had made according to her own taste; for in Thorpe, at Norwich, it had just been “Mary's bedroom,” something she had accepted exactly as she had grown up in it; and of course, at Miss Drew's, everything belonged to the house.

She felt also—and this was totally unexpected—a hot wave of shyness mounting up through her as she hesitated for a second to throw off her cloak. She pressed her knuckles quickly to her face, before she looked round, and prayed he wouldn't notice how burning her cheeks were! But he was snatching off her cloak now; and now he was standing back, for a minute, to gaze at her with adoration in her low white dress and bare arms and shoulders.

“What a . . . lovely . . . sash!” he whispered solemnly; and he seemed to be drinking her up with his eyes, just as if he were kneeling at her feet and she were the very cup at the altar. And his hands, his lips, his very soul, were pressed rapturously against her shoulders, her throat, her shy cold breasts.

The touch of her body began very soon to change this worship of her beauty into a more intense but less sacramental desire. His fingers began feverishly plucking at the fastenings of her bodice. But Mary remembered her carefully thought-out erotic diplomacy and she slipped away from him.

“No . . . no . . . no, John, Pm going to undress behind our screen. That's what I bought it for, at Wollop's! It's my dressing-room behind there—as well as my kitchen! You go and get quite ready for bed . . . give me my bag, though, my night-gown's in there . . . yes! get into bed as quick as you like, and I'll turn out the gas!”

When John recalled every conscious moment of all this night, after she had left him on Monday, the thing that remained in his mind a3 most entrancing was the marbly smoothness of her body when he held her at last. Being as queer as he had always been in his amorous peculiarities, and being as frantically fastidious as he was vicious, this smoothness of Mary's flesh was a new experience to him. He hadn't exactly expected her to be as scaly as a gryphon, or even as bony as old Tom was, but this heavenly smoothness was something quite unlooked for!

And she was so docile, too; that was another surprise to him; for he had expected, from what he had read in books, that she would be capricious, nervous, agitated, difficult

Yes, Mary was indeed “docile.” John was right in that! She too had her surprises that night; and the greatest of all these was the sense of absolute naturalness and freedom from embarrassment.

When she had felt that first rush of blood to her cheeks she had thought to herself: “Mercy! I'm not going to be silly in that way, am I?” But when once she had turned out that gas-flame . . . why! it was all as easy and nice as it had been in the wheatfield. It was nicer, in fact; for in place of the great Mother's confederacy with her daughter's psychic ravishing, as she lay on that sun-warmed bank, here, in this Northload bed, with the water-meadow scents coming in through the window almost as if they came from her own Norfolk fens, there was about her an older, deeper, darker protection than even of the earth; here there was about her the protection of the ancient night itself, oldest of all the gods, older than all the Thrones, Dominations, Principalities, and Powers that brood over Glastonbury, older than any Holy Grail. And Mary thought to herself: “Because I have found my love and because I have come to belong to my love, I will bear now, without making a fuss, whatever chance may give me to bear! I will think of what I feel now—pure gratitude; and I'll be sweeter to Miss Drew than anyone in all her days has been!”

And John thought to himself: “I wish I could get old Tom's troubles out of my mind! I wish I'd stirred up the Mayor a bit more to make things easier for Tom at the factory. I wish I hadn't asked him to come to the church. I wish I'd seen more of him lately! I've just dropped old Tom, I've just forgot him, neglected him, let him slide out of my mind!”

And as John lay there, discovering in the smoothness of Mary's limbs something that was as surprising to him as if he'd found a white seaweed or a blue wood-anemone, his shame about neglecting Tom became like a bruise, a definite bruise in some back-ledge of his consciousness. “/ must accept it,” he said to himself; and he began to think, as he slowly sank to sleep— the girl was asleep at least an hour before he was—that the only morality he possessed was a feeling of shame whenever he allowed himself to cry out, “I am miserable ... I am unhappy ... I am wretched.” Not to pity himself whatever happened and not to be miserable whatever happened: such was John's morality. To allow himself to go to sleep feeling distressed about Tom would have been a lapse from his interior code of honour.

As he heard St. John's clock strike two he gathered himself together within himself in a curious habit-gesture of the will. This gesture he always thought of in a particular way, using a special image for it. The image he used for it was a certain kind of black travelling trunk studded with brass nails.

Such a trunk he had once seen on a barge on the Seine. A man—a young working-man—was sitting upon it; and it was from this lad's expression that John had derived this particular symbol of refusing, whatever happened, to be unhappy, which constituted in his own mind the only morality. At the first temptation to such weakness, as at this very moment, when he was tempted to stay awake worrying about old Tom, he would make this habitual gesture of the will and visualise the black trunk with brass knobs!

It was a further proof of how women receive the tragedieo of others with a more vegetable-like acceptance than men. that while Mary went to sleep at half-past one full of a delicious sense of fulfilment, John found it very difficult, in spite of his black trunk with brass nails, to get the troubles of Tom Barter out of his mind.

No doubt a large part of this difference between them lay in the fact that Mary was much less nervous about sleeping with John than John was about sleeping with Mary!

Being one layer or one skin, so to say, nearer Nature than he, her love for him saturated her deeper identity more completely than his for her; so that the contact of strange flesh— strange at least under these new conditions—was much less of a nervous shock to her, for all her greater receptivity, than it was to him. His deeper soul had not really yet accepted this new experience, so that while her love made it possible for her to fall into a childlike sleep of absolute peace and security, John stayed awake for some while longer, worrying about Tom, and when he did sleep it was a sleep less deep than hers.

But before the church clock had struck another hour, both of the cousins were fast wrapt in unconsciousness in that little Northload room; and the wandering mists from the water-meadows of the Isle of Glass, floating in and out of their open window, renewed their strength as they slept; for these airs carried with them a far-off dim remembrance of the vaporous summer mists tbat at this very moment were rising from Dye's Hole and from Oxborough Ferry and from that great pool at Harrod's Mill where the personality of Tom Barter had first risen up between them.

TIN

It was now mid-September. The harvest—a particularly good one that year—had been gathered in, and the apples in those immemorial orchards of Insula Pomorum, those deep-grassed, grey-green orchards with their twisted trunks under which the cuckoo flowers are so dewy-fresh in the spring and the wasps so drunken-sleepy in the autumn, were beginning to grow yellow and red.

The elderly curator of the little Glastonbury museum was walking up and down between the famous Ancient British boat, over which he had kept guard for forty years, and the almost equally famous Lake Village pottery, much of which, during his long indefatigable regime, he had dug up with his own hands. That old canoe-boat had still a serviceable air. It looked as if it would almost have served the owner of Wookey Hole himself, to push his daring explorations beyond that Stone Witch, up his subterranean river; and the pottery too looked as if it could still hold the milk and honey of Avalon.

But Mr. Merry felt worried at that moment. It was Wednesday—early-closing day in the town—and he had been promised by Mr. Crow that if he could get down to the starting-field by two o'clock he should be taken for his first air-ride.

Bob Tankerville, the pilot, was going to fly to a certain factory town in France that day, one of a series of such expeditions that Philip had been making of late, but today, the master himself being unable to go, he had offered Mr. Merry this unique chance.

“Tankerville can do my business,” he had said. “All he wants is someone to grumble to.”

But it was now a quarter to one and there was no sign of an expected visitor fox whom he had been waiting since twelve o'clock.

“It'll be a rush to get my dinner,” thought Mr. Merry, as he stroked with his old fingers the edge of the ancient canoe. Being a bachelor, and very rigid in his habits, Mr. Merry made much of his dinner hour at the Pilgrims'. Since the Pageant, he had enjoyed these meals with especial zest, because his bete noire, Barter, whose flirtations with the waitresses were a source of perpetual irritation to him, had, since he left the dye works for the municipal factory, ceased to appear*

A rush! If there was one thing in life that Mr. Merry could not abide it was wThat he called “one of those damned rushes when you don't know7 what you're eating.” And here he wras, heading steadily, moment by moment, towards a rush. Partly by disposition, for he wTas one of those slowly moving persons who savour intensely their own physical functioning as they go to and fro over the earth, and partly from the habit of his profession, which dealt in huge tracts of time, the curator had come to resemble the biblical Creator; for to his erudite and historic mind, “a thousand years were as one day.”

He had been pestered now for nearly a fortnight by letters from the foreman of the municipal factory—an individual who signed himself “Radley Robinson”—for permission to talk to him on what the applicant called “affairs of importance.”

Did the passionate Red, whose baptismal name was Radley, feel any sense of a psychic-philological shock when he murmured to himself, pen in hand, “haffairs of himportance” and then wrote down the un-aspirated words?

Since the Pageant and since the unsatisfactory compromise— from his point of view—that had ended the dye-works strike, Mr. Robinson had been hardening his heart and- concentrating his energies. Deep in his soul shone still the illuminating lamp of “ 'ate”; but to his Jacobin destructiveness he had had the wit to add a great deal of indomitable cockney patience; and on the strength of this he had been promoted to the position of second-in-command under Barter. He had set himself to propitiate Barter with a ferocity of sly, satiric unction, that made that shrewd East-Anglian positively sick with aversion. But there w

Above all, the Mayor, doubtless at his daughter's instigation, was evidently anxious to soothe the man's wounded feelings by giving him material advancement.

Anyone watching old Mr. Merry at this minute, rubbing with a privileged forefinger this precious aquatic relic, under the very nose of his own proclamation against such doings, would have supposed that he was wondering what actual prehistoric human rump once squatted in tins frail skiff; but not at all. He was thinking to himself “If he doesn't come soon, I'll have to let the pudding go.”

But suddenly the door opened and there, quite unmistakably, was the pestering man.

Red looked like what is called a ticklish customer. He looked like a person capable of employment by Scotland Yard. But he also—with his neat foreman's suit and new cloth cap—looked a little like a master-plumber. He didn't look the kind of person. anyway, that Mr. Merry, from forty years' experience, felt he could dismiss with a well-worn jest about its being “early-closing.”

The curator sighed deeply as he requested his visitor to take a chair and learned that his name was Robinson.

“He's a pesterer,” he thought, “but he isn't an arch-pesterer. I may have time for pudding.”

He was right. Mr. Robinson plunged into business without any beating about the bush.

“What would you call this, Sir?” he enquired promptly, taking a stone from his pocket and handing it to the curator.

Mr. Merry took the object in his hand. It resembled a thunderbolt. It also resembled a lump of clay. The old gentleman's face became very animated.

“So you've found a bit, have you? Mr.—Robinson—ah! I thought—someone would—would find another—before long.”

He jerked out these detached syllables as if he were accepting the object in question for his museum. He did lick his finger now and rub violently one corner of it.