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Philip knew Angela well, of course, as her father, by no means an incompetent lawyer although a besotted glutton, had often done work for him; but her Madonna-like coldness—she certainly was “withdrawn” enough—had somehow repelled him. That a passionate friendship should have come to exist between such a silent, cold-blooded creature and the lively Percy struck him as weird, incongruous, incredible. But then—as he knew well enough—it was the incredible that was always happening in these things.

After the Pageant, when the fellow was well enough to leave the hospital, Tilly had reported the most fantastical tales of “something going on” between that crazy Welshman and Persephone. This he had never believed; but he had thought he understood the cause of the report, knowing only too well his cousin's passion for the bizarre and the exotic.

Philip stretched out his right arm now as he lay on his left side and seized in the dark the cold rosewood bedpost at his pillow's head. Out of the dream-dimension which surrounds our visible world the wraith of his Devereux grandmother struggled frantically to give him a warning. To be able to see his small, neat, well-moulded head—for these insubstantial tenants of the etheric envelope of our material plane find physical darkness no hindrance—lying on the pillow and not to be able to attract his attention was an atrocious tantalisation to this proud spirit from beyond our palpable dream-world.

The occasion was indeed only too characteristic of what the First Cause, in its malicious moods, delights to evoke; for while Philip, in a spasm of savage yearning for the slender waist of his cousin, gripped angrily that smooth bar of wood, the wraith of the only woman who had ever passionately loved him wrestled frantically with the laws of the universe to give him a sign, a token, a warning, that he was putting, not a blind hand upon a bedpost, but a blind foot upon a road that led to desperation and madness.

“Perse! Perse! Oh, Perse, where are you? Come back to me, Perse!”

But Persephone, in a little cheap bedroom she had taken at Dickery Cantle's dilapidated place, was even then, with her flushed cheek resting on her thin arm and her dusky boyish curls making a nimbus of darkness within the darkness, dreaming peacefully of Angela's devotion as they wandered together beneath the ruined carvings, so delicately foliated, so tenderly moulded by long-buried fingers, in Saint Mary's Chapel!

Into that narrow Bayeux Tapestry skull, while:—“Stop thinking that! Stop thinking that!” cries the old ghost-wraith more and more desperately, come scattered memories now of little inn-rooms in Taunton, in Exeter, in Bath, in Bristol, in Dorchester, in Tewkesbury; a curtain from that room, a flapping lind from this, a bedpost from that, a coloured print from tiis, a cock-crow full of a thousand misty Wessex dawns, a dog's ?arking, the rattle of early milk-cans—and mingled with all hese things those slender hips and the waist like that torso— rfiat the devil was it called?—that she had brought back to how him when she went to Italy!

To lie awake wanting, wanting, and with so little hope; to turn )ver on the right now (“But it's too late now, Philip my grandson; you should have done that at once!”), to turn on your Dack now, kicking the stone bottle viciously aside; and stretch-ng out so stiff and so straight, till the soles of your feet press against the woodwork; to snuff up nothing but the smell of Drown Windsor soap, and eider-down coverlet, and a faint odour of dog's dung from your muddy boots, in place of that maddening fragrance that always made you think of the sun-baked apricots in Canon Crow's walled-garden, the sweetness of those bare sun-burnt shoulders, was all this the result of that “autumn feeling” which you had encountered as you went to your interview with Zoyland at Wookey Hole?

“I could bear it,” he thought; “I could bear it if only her hips weren't just like they are . . . yes! yes! . . . and if only her curls didn't curl so tight against the back of her neck! It's those curls and those hips together that torment me so!”

He went to sleep at last, just about three o'clock; and while Emma was dreaming that she was helping old Sly on the Men-dips to shear a great black-faced ewe, with a face like the face of her mistress, and while Tilly was dreaming that the new silk lining of her ottoman had dyed itself—without the help of her husband's dye works— into an incredible shell-pink, the master of The Elms dreamed that the Mayor of Glastonbury brought him a vast basin made of glittering tin and held it before him and cried “Vomit!” and he dreamed that although he retched and retched he could not bring up anything except a little white saliva! But behold! Mr. Geard himself spat into that huge cauldron; and it came to pass that out of the mingling of their spittle there was created in the centre of that glittering vessel of shining tin, a little homuncula ... a little dazzling girl-child, . . and Philip found himself hoping frantically that the face of this homuncula would be Percy's face. But when the dazzling-ness of the little creature lessened or when his eyes could bear its brightness better, the features disclosed to him were such as he had never before seen. But Mr. Geard lifted up the cauldron to the full stretch of his arms and cried out with a thundering cry:—“Who is the Tin-Merchant now?” and then as Philip looked up at the vessel in the man's hands, behold! the bottom of it became ruddy as blood, and even as he gazed, drops of blood fell from it upon the ground and the ground was dyed purple; and he murmured in his dream:—“The lost dye! The lost purple dye!” and he fell on his knees beneath the vessel and he made his hands into a cup and he thought in his heart: “When he has gone I shall take this to my dye works . . . and it will go over all the world; and it will be called the Glaston-bury Purple!”

It was with his head full of the image of this dye that he finally sank into a dreamless sleep; and when he awoke, long after the birds of his garden had greeted the dawn, of all his dreaming it was only the dye he remembered. Geard, the shining vessel, the girl-child with the unknown features—all these he had completely forgotten.

And the slim waist of Persephone Spear had also receded into the far background of his mind.

WIND AND RAIN

We will have a grand opening, Crow,“ said Mr. Geard to his faithful John as they sat talking after supper in the old faded parlour of the Geard house. Not a thing had been done to improve this grotesque room since those times when, as Philip had assured the assembled family after his grandfather's will had been read, Geard had been ”a nuisance to everyone, with his two sprawling daughters, his preaching and his poverty.''

It was the first of October and a spell of wild stormy weather had set in. As John sat on the sofa by Mrs. Geard's side—for both the girls were out that evening—and watched his employer rubbing his big white hands and nodding his big white face over a wTarm fire of mixed coal and wood, the rain was streaming down the panes, and every now and then the two gas-flames hanging from the ceiling were caught in a draught of wind (for Mrs. Geard cared more for air than for the protection of curtains), and were blown sideways, in spite of their glass globes, in sinister tongues of blue flame, producing a startling flickering effect all over the room.

“We'll have more than that, Sir,” responded John, “if you and I are still alive.”

Round that faded old room, in that faded old petit bourgeois house, the October wind seemed to howl as if it had been sent from Stonehenge to hunt for Mr. Geard and was rejoicing at having found him.

“Hunt out this False Druid,” the gods of that Altar Stone must have said, “and put our Terror into him!”

There came into Mrs. Geard's thin, long face, with its mobile eyebrows and queer, troubled, flickering smile, a very curious expression as she looked up from her knitting. A Rhys of Pembrokeshire, as she was, there was something in a night like this that appealed to a deep-buried instinct in her, and in some odd way she relished the spectacle of all her old domestic objects cowering under the storm.

Funny old things they were—Mrs. Geard's possessions—the woollen antimacassars, the sickly yellow pears and blue grapes under a big glass covering, with red plush round its base, the staring picture of her father, the Plymouth Brother, with whiskers like a sailor and a mouth like a letter-box closed for Sunday; the old, worn, ash-coloured carpet, the black bear rug with broad red-flannel edgings and more mouse-grey skin than black hairs left to view, and all the ancient, stained, blotched, greasy cushions that always were to be, and never had been, re-covered; and the ricketty little tables with glaring tablecloths, and so many brackets with green and red tassels hanging from photograph frames, containing groups of Geards and Rhyses, the former a good deal less pompous-looking but hardly less stiff and uncomfortable in their photographer's parlours—all these things made up a sort of dusty, cushiony ensemble, like the huge nest of some kind of stuffed bird, now extinct.

And Mrs. Geard derived such a queer, sensual pleasure, as she listened to the wind howling round this room, just as if its ceiling were the roof of the whole house, and its walls the walls of the whole house! She had the feeling that this whole warm, cushiony, greasy, human-smelling place were being carried along through vast spaces of rainy night-air. She put down her knitting, left John's side, bade him “please remain seated, Mr. Crow!” and going to the window opened it yet a little more at the top, so that the gas-flames grew still more agitated and the red curtains bulged into still fuller convexities.

“Always the one for fresh air is my good wife,” said Bloody Johnny contentedly, as he watched this move of his lady's, and then returned with a zest to his conversation with John.

But Mrs. Geard, as she took up her knitting again,—thick, grey socks for her man's winter-wear—felt a further increase of voluptuous satisfaction as the draught from the window fumbled about with its blind gusty fingers through that comfortable room. Perhaps her princely South-Wales ancestors had felt something of the same feeling when the arras bulged out from their chilly walls and the smoke blew into the hall from their blackened fireplaces.

In good spirits that night was the Mayoress of Glastonbury, for her eldest daughter had told her, when she and Crummie were putting on their waterproofs and galoshes to go oi&vjtx ,, Lawyer Beere's party, that ]\ir. Evans had asked to have their*----' banns read out next Sunday at St. Benignus: Church.

So the flickering smile on the woman's face kept returning, as she knitted, and her eyebrows kept wrinkling up and wrinkling down, as they did when she was listening to Dr. Sodbury's sermons. If at this moment, in her high spirits, she had done exactly what she would have liked to do, she would have put on her old. weather-worn cloak, covered her head in her black shawl, snuffed up the whole cosy essence of this adored parlour of hers with one rapturous sniff, and set out to “call far”' her two children, doing it just as if she had been a nurse, come to take her little charges home from a children's dance.

Then as they took off their wet things in the hall she would have whispered to Cordelia, “I'll give you my wedding umbrella when you're married, Cordy!” Nor was Mrs. Geard's wedding umbrella a gift to be despised, for it possessed a handle of solid gold carved in the most majestic proportions.

“You're sure, Sir, that that London architect understood your design?” the crafty John was now remarking. “Some of these local people laugh at the idea of a Saxon arch associated with a Byzantine dome.”

“Ain't Saint Sophia's got a dome?” said Mr. Geard. “Ain't there domes in Russia? And ain't I seen a Saxon arch with me own eyes in a wall at Greylands ? 'Tis true it were walled-up, that good Saxon arch, but an architect from a place like London can un-wall 'un, can't he? I mean, see what 'twould be, if the stones were took out and make one similar to 'un?”*

One quaint and very characteristic peculiarity now manifested by the Mayor of Glastonbury was a strong tendency, since his accession to wealth and power, deliberately to revert to his old South-Somerset dialect, which was a mingling of the purer Somerset speech with a tincture of Dorset.

“Somewhere around Christmas would you have it, Mr. Geard, your grand opening celebration?”

Bloody Johnny smiled.

“Maybe then, and maybe not then,” he answered laconically.

“It all depends, Crow, and you know it do, on how things work out”

“As I've said before,” remarked John, “you won't get a real rush of people from the Continent till you've had a Miracle performed by this chalybeate spring of yours.”

Mr. Geard threw upon the fire another piece of wood. Most people in Glastonbury kept a wood-box by the side of their coal-scuttle. And then he amused his secretary, but did not at all surprise him, for John was getting used to the man's little ways, by a sly wink. “They shall have their Miracle all right, Crow; they shall have their Miracle!” he chuckled.

“The man's a prize charlatan,” thought John, “and yet he isn't! God knows what he is!” But aloud he said, “Well, Sir, supposing it gets into all the English papers, and supposing the Berlin, Paris, Vienna, Warsaw, Brussels, Rome, Madrid, Copenhagen papers report it, and supposing a regular Lourdes and Lisieux kind of a rush begins, how do you propose to stop the Anglicans, or the Roman Catholics, from exploiting such an event?”

“Ah, my boy,” grumbled Bloody Johnny, “you've hit our trouble in those words of yours, pretty closely, but I have me Blessed Lord at hand, and He's already begun taking up that matter with me.” The man rubbed his shins meditatively and leaning forward in his low arm-chair, pulled with both hands the shiny black material of one of his trousers close round his leg. This 'action seemed to give him some kind of spiritual comfort and he continued to enjoy the warmth, gazing into the fire with a curious film over his black eyes, the sort of film that might have covered the ophidian stare of the world-snake, at the bottom of the Northern Sea.

John Crow crossed one of his own scarecrow legs over the other and watched him, listening to the clicking of his companion's knitting needles and to the moaning of the wind in the chimney.

“The moment has come,” murmured Mr. Geard, thinking aloud, “for a fresh shoot to appear from the Glastonbury Thorn.”