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Taking him all in all, there was something warm, feline, and caressing about this man, and a certain air, too, for all his gentleness and quietness, of being a tartar, as they say, to meddle with or provoke.

He gave the impression—which was not entirely erroneous— of coming from some region bathed in constant sunshine. He had been called once by an antiquarian friend “Phoenician-looking”; but there seemed to be more of the sun in his composition than of the sea; and an ordinary person would have thought rather of Persia in connection with him than of anything Punic,

Trent was a nephew of old Mr. Merry and it was in consequence of what the curator had been telling him for the last six months in regard to all the new movements in the place that he had decided to come and practise in Glastonbury, He had already made friends with John Crow and Tom Barter and by their means had won for himself an entrance into the Geard household where his original personality had pleased Bloody Johnny so well that be had introduced him to Mr. Bishop, the town clerk. “The Council ought to have its own lawyer,” the Mayor had remarked to Mr. Bishop. “Besides Beere is much too conservative.”

The Mayor of Glastonbury in the depths of his South-Somerset heart, nourished a profound suspicion of all lawyers; but he had too many definite reasons for distrusting Mr. Beere to allow a few indefinite ones to prejudice him against Paul Trent.

“What I haven't yet been able to find in your town, Mr. Sheperd,” the sallow-faced young man was now saying, “is a good vegetarian restaurant.”

The Glastonbury policeman opened his left eye wide and half-closed his right eye. This was not a wink, for Mr. Sheperd would have regarded that historic gesture as a confession of confederacy in roguery. Besides he had the peculiarity of being able to retain this particular mask for as long as the precise tone of the conversation required it; namely the narration of something wonderful to the speaker but not wonderful to the hearer. “They eat raw turnips and such-like in them places, don't 'un?” Mr. Sheperd said. “I reckon us country folk see so much o' they things in daily life that us don't want to see 'un when us be enjoying ourselves at public house. Us likes to see a bit o' good meat then; such as a labouring man when my father were young, never saw all the year round 'cept Squire gave a parish dinner at Christmas.”

It had for so long been a recurrent refrain in Mr. Merry's conversation—“When my nephew Paul comes to practise here”— that when he did come, and even persuaded Grandmother Cole to give up to him her famous front bedroom, looking out on the High Street, everyone was frantic with curiosity. Old Mrs. Cole had retained for twenty years a neat little notice at the door of her High Street house, which contained the words “Front Bedroom To Let for a Single Gentleman” but the old seamstress was so fastidious in her Single Gentlemen that this pleasant sunny retreat had become for years a sort of unused state-parlour. Mr. Barter had visited it on his first arrival; but the presence of Sis and Bert in the back room, for Barter had no love of children, would have prejudiced him against the place even if the austere morality of the old lady had not been so apparent. But “my nephew from the Scilly Isles” as Mr. Merry always called Paul Trent, seemed to have no fear of either children or morality! and something about the long-nosed young man, perhaps his mania for elaborate ablutions in absolutely cold water, perhaps his passion for seedlings in window-boxes, perhaps the unbounded respect in which the whole town held his uncle, had induced Mrs. Cole, not only to give him her front room on trial,

“till I sees where we stands and how we feels,” but to let him retain it indefinitely.

But if the old Glastonbury policeman had opened his left eye when he was questioned about the vegetarian restaurant he positively gasped at the next remark of “my nephew from the Scillv Isles.”

“Are there any philosophical anarchists, Uncle, in this town of yours?”

“Bless me! Tut! Tut! You don't mean to say you have those notions in your head still, Paul? No, I should say not! I should think not\ Wouldn't you, Mr. Sheperd?”

But the old policeman was too dumbfounded to do more than open his right eye as wide as his left.

“Of course I'm the same as I always was, Uncle. You ought to know that! I wouldn't have come here if you hadn't told me so much about the new Mayor and his municipal factory.”

“But Mr. Geard isn't an anarchist, Paul; is he, Mr. Sheperd?”

The policeman spat on the gravel at his feet. His expression seemed to say—“I can't answer for these harum-scarum officials of recent date; but I know that when I first joined the force young men would not dare to talk so wildly.”

“Haven't you ever seen an anarchist before?” Paul Trent enquired point-blank of the horrified officer.

“I heard Dickery Cantle say,” replied Mr. Sheperd, “that his grandfather served drink to a Chartist once, and were mentioned by name for such doings, in a sermon at St. John's.”

“I met John Beere in the square this morning, Paul,” interrupted Mr. Merry, in order to change the topic, “and he asked me about you. I thought he would be crusty about your being made the Council's legal advisor; but he spoke quite nicely about you. He told me that Mr. Spear from Bristol was in town again and staying at Cantle's, though not in the same room as his wife. Angela, he told me, has made great friends with Mrs. Spear.”

The old policeman looked up sharply. “Thik Spear be a Roo-shian spy,” he murmured, “leastways that's what they tell I down at Michael's Bar; but I can't vouch for't, ye understands.”

“Talk of the devil------” cried Curator Merry, for at that moment Dave Spear, accompanied by Red Robinson, entered the courtyard of the museum. “Ah, Mr. Spear!” cried the old Curator, “We were just talking about you. How do you do, Mr. Robinson! Mr. Robinson here was one of the first to discover this vein of tin in Wookey, Paul, about which the Western Gazette is talking so much. This is my nephew from the Scilly Isles, gentlemen, Mr. Paul Trent.”

. “Well, Mr. Merry, I think I'll be taking a step round they Ruins,” threw in the old policeman at this point, feeling unequal to cope with such an invasion of revolutionary persons.

“Don't get up, Mr. Sheperd,” said Dave kindly. “I don't want to disturb you—or you either, Mr. Merry! We were looking for your nephew at Mr. Bishop's office; and he told us we'd probably find him here.”

“I'll come, I'll come,” murmured the moth-like young man, smoothing down his silky hair with a sun-burnt hand and picking up his felt hat from the gravel. As he went off with them his uncle could not help noticing how well his loose-fitting brown clothes suited his general personality.

“We wanted to see you, Mr. Trent, please,” began Red Robinson, “on a very important High Deer of Mr. Spear's, an High Deer which kime to 'im in Bristol.”

Dave Spear gave a nervous little laugh. It was part of his training as a good Communist to restrain his personal feelings in the furtherance of the cause; but he had never in his life met with an ally, or a tool, or a confederate, more alien to his spirit than Red Robinson. The man's vitriolic Jacobinism—reducing everything to a personal hatred of Philip—got on Dave's nerves. He had small reason himself on any account, to be indulgent to Philip, but there was that in Red's tone whenever he referred to him—a feverish murderous ferocity—which shocked and repelled his whole nature.

“If you two people don't mind,” said Dave, “I'd like to get a little exercise. It's lighter than it was. The sun may come out presently. But even if it doesn't, I'm sure it's not going to rain. Let's go to Chalice Hill and see how Geard's buildings and diggings are getting on? I've not seen that new inscription up there, either, that everyone's talking about.”

Spear's two companions agreed at once to this suggestion and they set out along Silver Street, past the Vicarage gate, past Miss Drew's gate, past the ancient Tithe Barn, till they arrived at Chilkwell Street. They did not delay very long contemplating Mr. Geard's improvements. As they peered between the rudimentary columns of the Saxon arch at the disturbed waters of the well, Red Robinson announced that in his opinion the labourers down there had been “bithing” in the fountain. Dave protested strongly against any such idea. “It's not the weather for bathing/5 he said. ”Besides,“ he added, ”they're all Glastonbury men; and everyone here respects this place."

“High'd bithe 'ere if I 'ad the mind,” muttered Red.

When they reached the top of Chalice Hill they hunted about for the newly discovered inscription but without success.

“It's either a fike or a bloody superstition,” said Red. “If I 'ad my way I'd clear out the whole bilin' 'eap of these, hloornin' relics.”

“Let's sit down,” said Dave, “and then we can tell Mr. Trent what we've thought of.”

They all three sat down on the already brown and fast-withering bracken and leaned their backs against a hillock of green moss. Red Robinson became silent now, leaving it to Mr. Spear to explain to Paul Trent what their idea was. Although he would never have confessed it and indeed would have been handicapped by his manner of speech in the expression of it, Red felt at that moment, as the sun began to show signs of breaking through the clouds, a vague feeling of sensuous well-being very unusual to him. The personality of Sally Jones presented itself vividly to his mind. He had been seeing a lot of Sally lately-and had come to the conclusion that he would ask her to marry him. He knew it was his mother's notion that he was Sally's social superior, she being the Geard's maid-of-all-work and he being foreman of a factory, but he had grown to be so fond of the girl that he was inclined to risk his mother's social disappointment.

It had been a good deal of a strain upon him, his' former aspiration for the hand of Miss Crummie; and it had been worse than a strain the rebuff he had suffered from Blackie Morgan. With Sally he felt, for the first time in nis relations with any froman, completely at ease.

Thus as he sat between these two gentlemen, conscious enough that they neither of them liked him, conscious enough that he had offended them by his word about “bithing” in Chalice Well, the effect of that faint flicker of sunshine upon the hillside was to throw around the sturdy figure of Sally a consolatory and comfortable warmth, like and yet unlike, what he used to feel for his mother when he was laughed at at his East-London Board-school.

“It's nice on this hill,” said Paul Trent.

“Yes,” agreed Dave, “and look at the way that shaft of sun— like a Rubens landscape, isn't it?—falls on Tor Field! It's peculiar to this place, a day like this, with the sun breaking through in spots, and those golden patches on the side of the Tor, and those workmen's figures in the haze. How do you feel about Glastonbury, Mr. Robinson? Have you come to get fond of it?”

“High hain't one for these hart and nighture feelin's,” said Red bluntly; but so paradoxical is human psychology, that the moment after he had made that remark he felt an overpowering longing to have Sally Jones by his side up here, giggling when he tickled her; and crying out, “Oh, Mister Robinson, how cynical you be!” when he denounced “all this fike and 'umbug!” He didn't think of Rubens and he didn't know purple from gold in the diffusion of all these drifting vapours; but by giving himself up to this melting tenderness towards Sally Jones as associated with what he was now looking at, there took place within him a certain blending of the man's flesh and blood with the chemistry of the elements, such as made that misty October scene really more memorable to him than to either of his companions.

“It's strange to think,” said Dave, “that when the Mayor has his grand opening ceremony for this new shrine, this whole hillside may be covered with a surging crowd of people from all over Europe.”

“Yes,” said Paul Trent. “But you won't get a crowd like that unless there's a miracle; and the time of miracles is past. What Pd like to see in Glastonbury is something very different from any of this miracle-mongering. I'd like to see—but you had something to ask me, hadn't you? We'd better come to business now—and talk later.”

Paul Trent sat upright upon his rather womanish haunches, with his arms curved tightly round his knees in their soft brown covering, and his delicate hands clasped together. His figure blent harmoniously with the bracken on which he sat. and the misty sunshine seemed to caress his silky brown head as if it were thankful to find some object more amenable to its wooing than the stubbly cranium of Dave or the carrotty poll of the cockney.

He looked, sitting there, like a figure brought to that spot by the far-journeying sun itself, so that it should be sure of at least one whole-hearted devotee in that land of green shadows.

“Well, gentlemen? What did you want to see me for?” repeated this visitor from the Scilly Isles.

Dave looked at Red; and Red looked at Dave. They both were conscious of that curious nervousness which so often descends on people who have an important communication to make. It is at such times as if the piece of news itself stands with its bearers at the closed door of the unwitting recipient's mind and appears suddenly, to these very attendants, like a bride they have chosen by lamplight and that they feel a little abashed by in the light of full day.

But Dave plunged in boldly and explained how his Bristol organisation, which was the largest in Wessex, had come to the conclusion that with a little skilful local handling a real commune might be established in Glastonbury. Dave confessed that the original idea of this commune had not come from the organisation but from his wife Persephone.

“She's probably forgotten now what she said,” he explained. “But she has these inspirations sometimes; and when I enlarged on her idea to the leaders of the Party in Bristol they were at once struck by it You see, Mr. Trent, we all feel that Glastonbury may never again have the luck to have a Mayor like Mr. Geard and that we ought to exploit such a great chance.” , The eyes of this moth-like figure grew suddenly lambent with excitement. “Did I . . . hear . . . you . . . correctly?” he cried. “Did I hear you say that your friends thought of starting a commune here?”

“They didn't think of it—nor did I think of it—it was my------”