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“Toller!” gasped Red in horrified alarm. “You stove that, strite and now! You stove it, I say! Shut yer bleedin' mouth and go to 'ell with your hidiocies! People in speeches may curse these bleedin' capitalists, but people what tike to iron bars are murderers, that's what they are, pline, downright murderers; and people who even 'ear such things be complexes of murderers; and I tell yer, Toller, I won't so much as 'ear one word more o* this from yer bleedin' mouth. I'll call the Missus strite now, and see what she says to your blitherin' hidiocies! Yes, I will. I'll call her strile now!” He moved, as he spoke, towards the door, but instead of displaying the least alarm at his threat, Mr. Toller, with ghaslly sangfroid, began deliberately to pull the cork from the bottle and pour himself out a glass of raw gin.

Red's hand was actually on the handle of the door when he turned round and contemplated this outrageous spectacle. His face worked convulsively, as he stood there; Lhe mixture of fear and fury in his heart almost choking him.

“Put—that stuff—down!” he spluttered; but instead of opening the door he found himself holding it tight shut with a sort of guilty violence. In a flash he beheld himself in the dock at Taunton, accused of plotting Philip Crow's murder at the hands of this slobbering devil. But Finn Toller coolly and quietly replaced the cork in the bottle.

“Thik iron bar be the best thing, then,” he repeated. “1 thought a man like you be, Mister, would say nothing less! I couldn't do it wi' a knife, nor yet wi' a bullet. One o' they girt iron bars be the very thing for anyone what feels on his mind, as thee and me does, the sweet savour of tirry-aniseed!”

Red glanced past that pock-marked, freckled face, wherein the weak blue eyes were suffused with a watery rheum, and stared miserably at the gingerbread on the table. How foolish people were, he thought, not to enjoy, with a gratitude to fate beyond expression, every minute of respectable, innocent happiness that was not in danger of the jail or the rope!

His moment of supreme misery was brought to an end by the heavenly sound of the front door opening and the voice of the landlord of St. Michael's Inn, raised in genial badinage. Never was a tiresome old gentleman's voice more welcome.

As Red opened the door, so vivid had been his plunge into crime, condemnation, convict's clothes, picking oakum, warders, jailers, chaplains, executioners, black-caps, drops, and burning lime, that he vowed that never again in his whole life would he introduce into a speech the word “tyrannicide.” As Finn Toller sneaked off now, under cover of the lively eulogies of iwMiss Jones“ that poured from the lips of the blustering old man, Red felt that never again, either, would he boast of heroic bloodshed to his admiring Sally. He had got such a glimpse into the monstrous, as he watched the adam's apple in Mr. Toller's throat jerk up and down while he drank that gin, that he thought as he submitted to the old gentleman's jokes, ”Better listen to such old-time stuff to the end of me dyes, rather than 'ave the 'orrible tighst in me mouth what I 'ad just then!"

“Well, if ye baint ashamed of yourself, ye ought to be!” pronounced Solly Lew emphatically as he dismissed his late protege through the back of the old stables and new garage.

“Us haven't done no harm to they, nor they done no harm to we,” protested Toller in a wheedling voice. “That were wondrous fine rum you gived I, Mr. Lew, and if the Lord wills I'll pay the good deed back to 'ee, come Christmas. Good night, Mr. Lew,— don't 'ee trouble to come no further. 'Tis a wild night for wind, looks so, but no token o' rain! I never likes these windy nights, Mr. Lew. They disturbs a person's” mind. Yes, I knows me way, thank 'ee kindly, god-den to 'ee."

But when Solly Lew had gone back into the house, Mr. Toller made no hurried departure from the scene. He had long been practising in Glastonbury certain patient, quiet, humble little methods of burglary; of burglary so unassuming, so unpretentious, so easily satisfied, that he had only once been caught at it, and since it was Bloody Johnny who caught him, eating uncooked sausages in his larder one November night, Codfin escaped even on that occasion with an eccentric reprimand.

He now set himself to survey the back premises of St. Michael's Inn. He had long been anxious to find out exactly how the land lay in this establishment, and tonight he felt in very good spirits, having found out all he wanted, and at the same time, by a stroke of what in his own mind he regarded as pure personal superiority, reduced the Mayor's foreman—and how he had done it he himself hardly knew!—to a position of nervous subordination.

He now planted himself under the protection of a big plum-tree that grew against the old stable roof and proceeded with uplifted beard to contemplate pensively the rear of the house. It must not be supposed that all the excited outpourings of human feeling that were whirling off on that west wind from so many dreaming heads—not to mention the two watchers at the open windows—were without their effect upon the nervous organisation of the watery-eyed Mr. Toller. Had Solly Lew, or any other boon-companion, enquired of him how he felt just then, Codfin would have doubtless replied—“I never have liked these here windy nights. These here nights be turble hummy and drummy to me pore head.”

As his weak eyes slowly swept over the ramshackle roofs and walls and chimneys before him, Toller's figure suddenly stiffened, like a nocturnal animal conscious of danger. He became aware that one of the back windows of the main structure of the house was wide open and that a human face was intently scrutinising him; and not only scrutinising him, but making signals to attract his attention.

Now Mr. Toller, who had no scruple about using iron bars and who had not the slightest fear of Mr. Sheperd, the old Glas-tonbury policeman, had from his childhood been awed into humble respect by the personality of Mad Bet. He recognised now that there was nothing for it but that he must do this creature's bidding. He recognised, in fact, with the same instinctive knowledge which Red had shown in his own case, that when in the presence of Mad Bet he was in the presence of a nature born to dominate him.

The woman was beckoning to him to climb up upon the stajbfe-. roof and come to her window; an exploit which, for a persfo*"-with any agility at all, was not a very difficult task. Mr. Toller accordingly made an obeisance with his head and a sort of salaam with his hands, such as Sinbad the Sailor might have made in the presence of some Grandmother of the Djinn, and set himself to climb. The wind was his chief trouble in this ascent; for the plum tree afforded him a ladder at the beginning; and once on the roof, as far as the actual climbing went, all was easy. But the wind made it difficult for the man to keep his balance; made it very difficult for him to advance. He crawled forward upon his knees as best he could; but many times he was forced to lie prone on his stomach and remain absolutely still while the wind-gust whirled over him.

What did Codfin think about during these moments when he lay on the cold slate tiles, in considerable peril of being toppled over and rolled down? To translate his thoughts into ordinary speech would cause their tang, their salt, their fine edge, to be lost; but the drift of them was doubtless something like this: “I'll be glad when Mad Bet lets me go. Mad Bet's got a message for me. Mad Bet's message is to some man she's taken with. I wouldn't mind, same as some would, if Mad Bet were taken wi' I! A 'ooman be a 'ooman; and when a 'ooman do smile at I, it do wrinkle up her face, all soft and sweet, even if she be as ugly as sin.”

Such, in rough clumsy sfeort-hand, were some of Codfin's thoughts as he advanced slowly over the stable roof, lying flat when the gusts were worst, and crawling forward when they subsided.

According to the wise, if somewhat tragic philosophy of Dr. Fell, the thoughts of this scum-beetle from the Beckery stews were just as important, in the total sum of things, that night of the tenth of December, as the dreams of Parson Dekker or of the Mayor himself. But it must be remembered too that according to Dr. Fell's philosophy there was a deep importance, perhaps only a little less deep, in the feelings of a bewildered flea that Mr. Toller had carried away in his vest with him from his Beckery lodging.

“'Twere sweet as rum and sugar to make that cockney sod take notice!” Such might be a rough translation of yet another of Mr. Toller's thoughts as he cowered in the wind under the racing clouds and tore his finger-nails in the interstices of the slate tiles. Those old slate tiles, on St. Michael's stable roof, came from the same part of South Wales as did this great west wind and neither they nor it seemed prepared to lend themselves easily to the proceedings of Codfin thus struggling to obey the commands of Mad Bet.

But he reached her window at last and to his dismay found that she intended to descend to the ground in his company! Finn Toller was not the man to shirk; but it must be confessed that if there had been any trace of tipsiness left in him, this command of the madwoman's—and il was given with the calmest certainty of its being obeyed—would have made him deadly sober.

The woman was warmly dressed and warmly shawled for the adventure when he finally reached her. That was one good thing. Another good thing was that her bonnet was tied with very strong tight strings under her chin. He could never have got her down in this wind, though he probably would have tried, if she hadn't herself, with the supernatural cunning of the insane, told him exactly what to do. She told him exactly where he could find a ladder and she told him how he could fix the end of this ladder in the projecting leaden rain-pipe and lay it flat along the roof, thus affording a support for her knees in the wind, and, when they finally reached the gutter, an easy way of getting down.

It took so long to make all these moves, especially when he had the woman out upon the roof with him, that by the time he had got the ladder safe down from the leaden gutter and had it firmly fixed in the earth for her final descent, it was about three o'clock.

“Her be a master-sprite, her be!*” he thought to himself, as he looked up at the wind-blown shawl and flapping bonnet huddled at the edge of the water-spout; though where he had picked up the phrase “master-sprite” he could not for the life of him have remembered.

She made him take the ladder back when she was once on the ground, to the place where he had found it. Then, for the first time, she told him what she wanted him to do.

An hour later—but still a long way from the approach of the winter's dawn—Finn Toller found himself seated inside St. Michael's Tower on the top of Glastonbury Tor, facing Mad Bet. Mr. Geard's London architect had lately been making a few necessary repairs in the interior of the structure and it was onlv for this reason that these two had been able to enter. It would have been totally dark within this stone fortress of Mat Dekker's God had not Betsy—who had made, during the long half hour when her liberator was fighting the wind on that stable roof, the cunning preparations of a crazy one with a fixed idea— brought with her two or three candle-ends, extracted from candlesticks left by chance in her place of temporary captivity.

Finn Toller produced matches from his pocket and proceeded to light one of these candle-ends, setting it up, by the help of its own grease, upon a piece of boarding. The flickering little flame soon illuminated—but there were no living eyes except their own to envisage the scenes—not only Bet's old-fashioned bonnet and quilted shawl, but the straggly beard, freckled face and watery-eyes of the derelict who sat opposite her, and who now filled the blackened stub of a clay pipe and set himself to smoke> as he leaned his back against the eastern wall of their square stone refuge.

The howling and shrieking of the wind, as these two sat there, made about their ears a deafening tumult, so that it was necessary for them to raise their voices to an unnatural pitch if they were to make their meaning audible. So innocently heathen was Finn Toller that when Bet shouted at him: “Archangel's walls be strong 'gainst they Devils!” he had the notion under his tow-coloured poll that Bet was referring to her familiar spirit by some particular pet name.

But Bet was quite right. Gwyn-ap-Nud's Powers of the Air were surely abroad in full force that night; and Michael's great wings needed to be strong indeed to ward off from Glastonbury these rushing hosts.

“Why don't Mayor Geard build up Archangel's Church?” shouted the woman, “instead of dipping folk's bodies in thik wold Well?”

Mad Bet had put an unanswerable conundrum this time before her rescuer. Mat Dekker would have altogether entered into the spirit of this question. Over and over again had he remarked to Sam—“There can't be more than a dozen real Christians in this place, me boy; or instead of these fantastical Pageants I'd be celebrating Mass up there in a great new church!”

But Finn Toller puffed away at his clay pipe in silence. His awe in the presence of his companion was so great that he had actually done what he had never in his life done before; asked a woman's permission to light this pipe of his! And Mad Bet's permission had been given in true hieratic fashion. But it was a different thing when she talked to him of rebuilding churches to St. Michael. A patient, though not a sulky silence fell on him then.

Finn Toller took off his cap and leaned back his head against the stone wall. He couldn't see the stars at the top of the great funnel in which they sat, because of certain cross-beams which the Mayor's architect had put across that dark hollow space. He experienced at that moment, however, one of the nearest approaches to religious exultation that he had known since as a child he had been taken to see General Booth pass through town. To be alone with Mad Bet on the top of Glastonbury Tor was something to remember. Burglaries and iron bars were trifles in comparison. But to be alone with a holy 'ooman, as he mentally named his companion, was not destined toi be without its penalties. It was with some perturbation that he saw her now bend-Aig down over their solitary candle-flame.

“What be doing, Mad Bet?” he enquired nervously, using the epithet mad much as Tossie would have used the word Ladyship in addressing Rachel.