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Three figures, a man, a boy, and a sheep-dog, as grey and woolly as the flock itself, walked patiently and somnolently behind them. As he watched these figures and that moving river of grey backs in front of them his mind was carried away upon a long vista of memories. Various roads where he had encountered such sights, some of them in Norfolk, some of them in France, came drifting through his mind and with these memories came a queer feeling that the whole of his life was but a series of such dream-pictures and that the whole series of these pictures was something from which, if he made a strong enough effort, he could awake, and feel them all dispersing,** like wisps of vapour. Pain was real—that woman crying out upon her cancer and calling it “Lord! Lord!”—but even pain, and all the other indescribable horrors of life seemed, as he stared at the backs of those moving sheep, to be made of a “stuff,” as Shakespeare calls it, that could be compelled to yield, to loosen, to melt, to fade, under the right pressure.

Gone were the sheep now; and a second later, following them in that same dreamlike movement, gone was the man, and the boy, and the dog. John's mood changed then with an abrupt jerk. Something in his mind seemed to fall with a machine-like click into its normal groove.

Slyly he turned round and glanced at Crummie. The girl had slipped off her cloak, spread it on the ground, and was sitting with part of it wrapped round her knees. She waved to him as he caught her attention and he waved back. None of these workmen had the least desire to spy upon the master. Bloody Johnny was at liberty to perform any crazy ritual he liked behind those walls. “I might just as well be sitting by Crummie's side,” he thought. He peered round the other way to see what the taxi' man was doing. Solly Lew also was sitting down—on a stone or a log or something—calmly smoking his pipe and contemplating the workmen. But John's imagination was at work now. What on earth was Geard doing to that woman? Most repulsively— for John's mind had a Goya-like twist for the monstrous—he saw his employer dipping that poor creature in his precious chalybeate water! He saw the scene with hideous and telescopic minuteness- He saw the filthy underwear of the poor wretch, unchanged for a week no doubt while she beat the nurse away, and all stained with ordure. He saw vermin, frightened by the water, leaving her clothes and scurrying away across the slabs of the fountain where they would undoubtedly perish miserably. He saw the loathsome image of the cancer itself. Geard was bathing it in that reddish water and muttering his grotesque invocations, while the woman—John could see her face—was terrified into forgetting her pain by the cold shock of the water. No doubt it had come into her simple mind that the Mayor had decided to rid Glastonbury of her. John's imagination after being so dazed by the sheep was now seized with a terrifying clairvoyance. He followed one of Tittie's vermin in its flight from Bloody Johnny's vigorous ablutions. And he saw it encountering a lusty wood louse which had had to turn itself into a leaden-coloured ball to avoid Mr. Geard's feet but which, appearing now in the other's path like an immense Brontosaurus, had uncurled itself to the view of the human louse.

“All is strange to me,” said the human louse to the wood louse. He spoke the lice language with its beautiful vowel sounds to perfection.

“On the contrary,” said the wood louse, speaking the same ancient tongue but with a rude rural intonation, “you are the only strange thing here to me.”

“Could you direct me------” the human louse enquired, giving

its words a classical resonance, indicative of the fact that its ancestors had lived with the Romans, “to any human skin in this vicinity?”

The wood louse rudel) disabused this dainty traveller of his high hope; and reported that the only skin except the bark of trees available in that quarter was the skin of a rabbit that had been caught in a trap a year ago.

“Nothing can save you from dying of starvation that / can see,” said the wood louse, “except to be discovered by some bird small enough to snap you up. If you like I will pass the word round that you are in such mental anguish that------”

Here the story John had told himself broke off; but he continued thinking about the monstrous arrogance of the human race in lumping together in one clumsy and ridiculous word—“instinct, instinct, instinct”—all the turbulent drama, full of crisscross psychic currents and convoluted struggles and desperations of the subhuman world.

The thought of the luckless fate of this miserable vermin in the unchanged clothes of this rebel against Nurse Robinson brought into John's mind just then, under that heavy sky, the real ghastliness of the word relative. “It's relatively important that those vermin 'should escape starvation,” he thought. “It's relatively important that Geard should have his miracle. It's relatively important that this wretched woman should be eased of her pain. It's relatively important that my life with Mary should be exquisitely happy. It's relatively important that this grave ass Philip should get the town council's leave to make his road over the marshes. God! What a mix-up it all is. I don't care! I didn't make the world. Fm not responsible. There could not be a sweeter creature than Mary—no! not from Glastonbury to Jerusalem!”

While these thoughts were passing through John's mind, Mr. Geard, stark naked in the Grail Fountain, the water of which came up beyond his waist, and watched by the petrified astonishment of Tittie, who reclined with her back against the base of the Saxon arch, was extending his arms in some sort of command, John was utterly wrong in his imagination. Not once did Mr. Geard call upon the Blood of Christ. Not once did he sprinkle with the blood-red water the woman with cancer. Mr. Geard's clothes lay in a neat heap at Tittie's side; and the woman, in stupefied amazement, was watching his uplifted fingers as they kept mechanically opening and closing in the tempest of his mental struggle.

Mr. Geard was not praying. That was the difference between this occasion and the other occasions when his therapeutic powers had been used. He was not praying. He was commanding.

If the question were asked, what precisely was Mr. Geard thinking and feeling as he lifted his arms from the Red Fountain, the answer would have to be that he was assuming to himself the role of a supernatural being! As a matter of literal fact— such were the childish limitations of this singular man's nature —Mr. Geard had, for one second, visualised to himself a picture in the Sunday School at Montacute, representing Our Lord in the process of being baptised in the Jordan! There was no conscious blasphemy in this flickering thought, and it had not lasted. Now he was neither iMnking nor feeling. Now his whole body and soul were absorbed in an act This act was the act of commanding the cancer to come out of the woman; commanding it on his own authority; so that the growth in Tittie's side should wither up!

The truth is that this chalybeate fountain on this particular hillside had been the scene of such a continuous series of mystic rites, going back to the neolithic men of the Lake Village, if not to the still more mysterious race that preceded them, that there had come to hang about it a thick aura of magical vibrations. That rabbit's skin in the trap, referred to by John's wood louse, might lose its virtue owing to rain and frost and bleaching sun; but this psychic aura, charged with the desperate human struggles of five thousand years to break into the arcana of Life, no rains could wash away, no suns could dry up, no frosts could kill.

Immersed to the waist in this ruddy spring which had been the scene for five thousand years of so much passionate credulity, it is not strange that Mr. Geard, whose animal magnetism was double or treble that of an ordinary person, should find himself able to tap a reservoir of miraculous power.

No sacred pool, in Rome, or Jerusalem, or Mecca, or Thibet, has gathered such an historic continuum of psycho-chemical force about it as this spot contained then, and contains still. But Mr. Geard did not confine his reservoir of healing power to what this locality had stored up. He wrestled at that moment with the First Cause Itself. Now it can be understood why he chose a day so damp and dark and windless, so brown, so neutral, so apathetic, so heavy with drowsy mists, for his grand experiment. It was because—led by an instinct which he himself could never have explained—he wanted to get into touch with the First Cause Itself uninterrupted by the dynamic energy of the Sun or Earth or any subordinate Power. The man was now like an athlete of some kind as he stretched out his arms and concentrated his massive and mountainous energy.

The curious thing was that his mind remained perfectly calm, clear and quiet. It was always rare for Mr. Geard to lose his sangfroid, even at the most culminating crisis; and he was now quite coolly saying to himself—“If I do it, I do it. If I don't do it, I don't do it—and the woman must die. But I shall do it. I feel it in me. I feel it in me.”

What Mr. Geard kept his mind steadily upon, all this while, was that crack, that cranny, that slit in Time through winch the Timeless—known in those parts for five thousand years as a cauldron, a horn, a krater, a mwys, a well, a kernos, a platter, a cup, and even a nameless stone—had broken the laws of Nature! What Mr. Geard really did—being more practical and less scrupulous than Sam Dekker—was to associate this immemorial Fetish with the Absolute, wTith Its creative as distinct from Ils destructive energy. Sam, in his passion for the crucified, opposed himself to the First Cause, as Something so evil in Its cruelty that a man ought to resist It, curse It, defy It, and have no dealings with It. Thus in his loathing of the evil in God, Sam. the Saint, refused to make any use of the beneficence in God: and this refusal was constantly handicapping him in his present “all-or-nothing” existence. Mr. Geard on the other hand was prepared to make use of this ambiguous Emperor of the Cosmos without the slightest scruple.

Mr. Geard now happened to catch the sound of a peewit's cry, a sound that was one of his favourite bird calls, for he associated it with certain particular fields on the road from Montacute to Yeovil, and he regarded it, reaching his ears at this crisis, as a most blessed omen. Simultaneously with this cry, which was not repeated, he noticed, to his intense satisfaction, that Tittie Peth-erton was yawning! “Fve done it” he said to himself, and straining every nerve of his nature, body and soul together, he forced himself to envisage that cancer as something towards which he was directing arrow after arrow of blighting, withering, deadly force. “The great thing is to see it,” he said to himself, while his black eyes now alight with their most burning fury, stripped the poor woman of every stitch of clothing.

His arrows of thought now became a spear—the Bleeding Lance of the oldest legends of Carbonek—and with an actual tremor of his upraised, naked arms, he felt himself to be plunging this formidable weapon into that worst enemy of all women! “I've done it,” he repeated, for the second time, as he saw Tittie's eyes begin slowly to close.

And then Mr. Geard shivered and his teeth began to chatter.

Perhaps he wouldn't have succeeded after all if there hadn't come into his head at that moment an actual vision of one tiny living tendril of that murderous octopus under the sleeping woman's flesh. With one terrific upheaval of the whole of his massive frame, its gastric, its pulmonary, its spinal, its phallic force, and even lifting himself up on tiptoe from the gravel at the bottom of the fount, he plunged that Bleeding Lance of his mind into the half-dead cancer.

Then he bowed himself forward, like the trunk of a tree in a great storm, till his forehead touched the surface of the water. From that surface he proceeded to gulp down, in long, panting, gurgling gasps, enough water to satisfy the thirst of the Questing Beast. “Blood of Christ!” he spluttered; and it was the first time during this great struggle that his favourite expression had crossed his lips.

And then his former utterance escaped once more from the depths of his throat, like a veritable grunt of that Questing Beast; and almost inarticulately the words rose from the chalybeate water, “I've done it!” sighed Mr. Geard for the third time.

He now scrambled out upon the new stone slabs, took one quick complacent glance at the foundations of the Saxon arch, and began hurriedly drying himself. For this purpose he used, not his grey flannel shirt, as anyone would have expected, but a new black woollen waistcoat which Megan had just finished knitting for him.

When he had got all his clothes on, including his thin black overcoat and a sort of Low Church parson's hat, which was his favourite headgear and which he now squeezed low down over his forehead, he lifted up the sleeping woman very carefully in his arms and carried her out between the pedestals of his arch. It was Crummie who had dressed Mrs. Petherton for this great excursion—certainly the most important she would ever make, till “the young men,” as the Scriptures would put it, “carried her out for her burial”—and Crummie had found an old purple bonnet in a cardboard box which she had placed on her head, tying the strings round her neck.

From Mr. Geard's fingers, spread out now under the woman's back, this hat now dangled by one of its purple strings, flapping against his knees as he carried her down the hillside.

Bloody Johnny's three attendants hurried anxiously to meet him and great was their relief—shared to the full by Mr. Lew— at the cheerful tone in which he greeted them.

While this momentous event was occurring upon Chalice Hill, a certain young man, who was a newcomer in the town and had only recently opened a lawyer's office in High Street, was talking to Merry the curator and to Mr. Sheperd the policeman on a bench in the little gravelly court-yard outside the Museum.

This young man's name was Paul Trent, and the impression he produced upon sensitive people was that he ought to have been endowed with a less brief and less masterful name than this. He was indeed as silky and soft as a moth; and like a moth were his gentle movements. Brown were his eyes, with long lashes; very dark brown was his hair; while his skin was of a delicate ivory-yellow tint with a faint brownish tinge in the cheeks and chin. His lips were red and full, the under lip a good deal larger than the upper; and his mouth, usually a little open, showed beautiful teeth.