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The woman was melting one of her other candle-ends at the lighted candle. Having reduced the wax thereof to the desired softness she rapidly proceeded to mould it into the rough likeness of a human figure.

“Thik be her\” she now remarked, holding up this distorted inch of wax.

Then, hurriedly rising, she muttered some devilish incantation, quite inaudible to the dumbfounded Codfin, and proceeded to stamp upon the image she had made, grinding the wax into a shapeless mass of candle-grease and mud and saw-dust, under her heavy heel. As she trod, she began muttering again; but this time her words were audible to the astonished waif from the Beckery slum:

“Dirt ye was and dirt ye shall be!” screamed the madwoman ferociously. “I've a done for 'ee now, ye bitch! Dirt ye be now, I tell 'ee! Dirt ye be; as ye were afore he picked 'ee up! Dirt! Dirt! Dirt!” and the grinding heel finished its savage job so completely that there was soon nothing left of that fragment of obliterated wax. Then with several long-drawn panting breaths Mad Bet resumed her seat.

“Can 'ee keep a secret, man?” she shouted at the agitated Mr. Toller whose watery eyes were now staring anxiously at the tower door.

It was in Codfin's mind that her familiar spirit, whom he had heard invoked as “Archangel,” might at any second take a palpable shape. This was the only moment in that long eventful night when Mr. Toller experienced a real shock of agitation, save for his first sight of the woman at the window.

“I be a grave for they secrets, Mad Bet,” he now remarked, in a resigned voice, puffing furiously at his pipe as if with the intent to evoke a screen of wholesome smoke between himself and the supernatural.

“ 'Twere her what you seed I stamp into nothing,” went on the madwoman. “In Archangel's Tower I stamped on she. Looksee!—how candle do splutter and spit! Now 'tis done. 'Twere her I stampit out. Hist! How thik wind do blow! 'Twere me wone heel what stampit she into dirt. Her be dirt now; and her'11 stay dirt till Judgment!”

Mr. Toller's eyes became more watery than ever owing to the acrid smoke which he sucked out and blew forth. To his companion's tirade he thought best to make no reply. He had almost as strong a desire to disassociate himself from these proceedings as poor Red had recently had to disassociate himself from “tirry-aniseed” and iron bars.

“If I speak her name, Finn Toller, will ye hold 'un mute and mum in thee's deep soul?”

Mr. Toiler^ lower lip hung down; and two thin streams of saliva, stained with tobacco-juice, dripped upon his filthy shirt and upon his still filthier vest. The flea which he had brought with him from his Beckery shanty snuggled up to his breastbone, deriving much comfort from the pale-coloured hairs, smelling like those of a dead stoat, which grew on the man's chest.

But he answered, as Homer would say, “from his steadfast heart”: “What you do tell to I, Mad Bet, be more hid than they hanging-stones in Wookey. Folk can see they stones for sixpence; but not for twenty pound would I betray thee, 'ooman ... no, not for twenty times twenty!”

Thus reassured, Mad Bet spoke her mind freely.

“Her be thik baggage, thik hell's broth piece o' harlotry, what li\res wi' wold Miss Drew. Some do say she be married to 'un; others do say she be his light-o'-love. But whether or no for that, she do go to's bed in Northload, every night, weekday and Sunday. She do bless herself for living soft and cosy wi' thik old 'ooman by day, and she do mightily cherish being colled and clipped in's bed, when night do come! Heigh! but she do like being naked to thik man's dear hand, night by night, and all so daffadown-dilly in pretty bed-clothes! I do know she's feelin's by me wone feelin's, Mr. Toller, and I do thinky and thinky, when night do come, how she do lie so snug and warm wi' he.”

Mr. Toller's masculine brain began to be totally confused. Mad Bet was talking of her enemy as sympathetically and understanding^ as if it were her daughter. Codfin could understand bringing down an iron bar on the head of a rich mine-owner; but this sympathising with the feelings of someone you were reducing to dirt under your heel was a subtlety of vengeance beyond his grasp.

“I do know thik lass,” he contented himself with saying. “I've a-been inside Missy Drew's fine house wi' Bob Rendle from Ditchett Underleaze. Us never took nothin', for Bob were frightened when Lily Rogers talked in she's sleep; but I've a-been upstairs and downstairs in thik fine house.”

Mad Bet pushed back her Sunday bonnet, with its forget-me-not border, till Toller could see the gleaming whiteness of her bare skull by the guttering candle-dip. He fidgetted uneasily under the glance she now fixed upon him.

'Tve a-never killed a gal yet, Mad Bet, and I be------" It

is probable that no effort of any human will, made in all Glastonbury that night, was more heroic than the effort required from Mr. Toller as he completed this speech—iuand I be too old to begin now!"

Having made his stand, Mr. Toller must ha\Te felt an overpowering desire to soothe what he supposed would be the madwoman's fury. He had known from the beginning that her present obsession was about Mary; for since Mother Legge's Easter party Bet's mania for John was one of the chief tavern topics. If Finn Toller had in his nervous organisation anything resembling what in popular parlance is called a “complex,” such a “complex” consisted in the idea—almost, although not quite, a complete illusion—that people were continually wanting to bribe him to commit some murder.

Was Mr. Toller a homicidal maniac? Any glib answer ta this question would, be a misleading one. Human character is far more complicated than is suggested by these popular scientific catchwords. Exact and very circumstantial detail would be required just here. Mr. Toller would, as a matter of fact, have found it much harder than Penny Pitches or than Emma Sly to kill a chicken. Cruelty to a child would have been more difficult to Mr. Toller than to anyone in Glastonbury, except perhaps Harry Stickles' wife, or Abel Twig of Backwear Hut. On the other hand, to hide in the bushes with that iron bar; to steal up softly behind Mr. Crow; to crack, with one sweeping horizontal swing of his under-nourished arms, Philip's Norman skull; to beat that unconscious skull into a pulp by hammering it afterwards with the iron bar; these proceedings would undoubtedly have been accompanied by a voluptuous glo.w of intense sensuality.

Perhaps the strictly correct view of Mr. Toller's nature was that he was a “homicidal maniac” only with regard to the killing of the most powerful personage in his immediate environment. But it is doubtful whether the definitions of tyrannicide, given in the public library dictionary, included the element of voluptuous sensuality in the killing of tyrants. To catch the vibration of this element Mr. Toller would have to have looked up other, more modern words; words which, it is quite certain, would have been to him totally unintelligible.

“Six o'clock Solly Lew do open up,” remarked Betsy now, pulling down her bonnet into a respectable position. “I reckon it be near five, Mr. Toller. Us better be moving!”

She rose to her feet as she spoke and extinguished the guttering candle, leaving them with no light at all but that which descended from the wind-shaken, cloud-bespattered firmament. This extinguishing of that little yellow pyramid of fire took on a grandiose significance from the austere and deliberate manner in which she did it. It was just as if she were washing her sorceress-hands in that small flame; washing them clean of all further association with such a chicken-hearted “tyrannicide” as Finn Toller.

Thus, when they emerged from St. Michael's Tower, and began to descend the Tor, without having spoken one single definite word, Mad Bet allowed Finn Toller to feel himself to be a cowardly, effeminate, unreliable, untrustworthy traitor!

It was a melancholy proof of how remorseless a tyrant Eros is, that Mad Bet should have descended Tor Hill without one grateful word to her devoted servant! The invisible Watchers of that Glastonbury Divine Comedy must have recognised something curiously unfair in the fact that while the madwoman had this devouring passion for John, Finn Toller had no blinding, drugging, heart-hardening obsession wherewith to armour himself against misfortune. His pale freckled face and straggly beard drooped together under those windy stars, and his arms and legs moved like those of an automaton, as he wearily followed that forget-me-not bonnet and fluttering shawl.

He resembled a -scarecrow that this crazy love-bewitched creature had compelled by her incantations to follow her, up that hill. He did not pity himself; he did not say to himself: “Women's ingratitude is like the ingratitude of the Arch-Fiend!” He only thought to himself again and again: “Her wants me to kill that gal what lives wi' old Miss Drew; but I never yet have killed no gal; and I baint going to begin killing gals—no! not even for Mad Bet!”

The most materialistic of human beings must allow that at certain epochs in the life of any history-charged spot there whirls up an abnormal stir and fume and frenzy among the invisible elements or forces that emanate from the soil.

Such a stir, such an invisible air-dance was at its height as this man and this woman descended the hill, between five o'clock and six o'clock, on that dawn of the eleventh of December.

From the poor bones in the town cemetery on the Wells Road —out beyond The Elms—rose up certain faintly stirred and barely perceptible responses to this thaumaturgic wind; but if from these bones a dim tremour came, much more did a turmoil of subconscious reciprocity—to use the Wessex poet's great word —gather about Gwyn-ap-Nud's Hill from the royal and sacrosanct bone-dust buried beneath the Abbey Ruins. The wind arrived at Glastonbury carrying feathers and straws and husks and ditch-vapours with it that it had picked up from Meare Heath and Westhay Level, from Chilton-upon-PoIden and Baw-drip, from the banks of the River Parrett, from Combwich and Stogursey Brook, from Chantry Kilve and Quantock's Head. But from Glastonbury it could only carry away, along with other wisps and husks and straws and ditch-vapours, such dreams as were the lighter emanations of the place. It could carry away the dreams of Jimmy Rake and Mr. Stilly, of Bartholomew Jones and Jackie Cole, of Mr. Merry and of Emma Sly, of Solly Lew and of his son Steve; but not of the Town's Mayor or of the Town's Vicar.

But even with these the west wind's burden, as it left Glastonbury, was too heavy. For it must needs enter the open windows of the hospital and burden itself with the dreams of Nell Zoyland's son—a child with th,e very lineaments of Sam Dekker, even to his curious chin—and also with the dreams of Tossie's girl twins which were of such incredible lustihood as to resemble the sturdy dreams of -the winter grass, growing in those low meads where the Evercreech man's father-in-law kept his Jersey cattle.

Crude and coarse and wholesale are our psychic judgments about newborn children, compared with the careful discriminations we use in physical chemistry. To any scrupulous eye among the supernatural watchers of Glastonbury it would have been clear that the soul of Nell's little boy was already avid with by far the most intense, clutching, insatiable life-greed that existed in the whole town—a greed that made Philip's egoism seem like courteous absent-mindedness and Red's inbred hate like the itching of a nettle-sting. It would also have been clear that Tossie's twins were so easy-going, so sweet-natured, so unselfish, that it was as if all the humour of Tossie herself had been mingled with the wisdom of Tossie's mistress and with the piety of cousin Nance.

By burdening itself with the greedy dreams of Nell's little boy, who actually cried in his sleep because the nurse refused to wake his mother so that he might be suckled, and with the vegetative feelings of Tossie's little girls, who seemed perfectly prepared to let off their mother and enjoy any alien nourishment at any moment, the wind seemed to need a greater momentum to carry it away northeast, towards its resting-place on Salisbury Plain, than it possessed. It flagged a little by the time it reached West Pennard. It dropped some of its tiny moss-spores, its infinitesimal lichen-scales, its fungus-odours, its oak-apple dust, its sterile bracken-pollen, its wisps of fluff from the bellies of Sedgemoor wild-fowl, its feathery husks from the rushes of Mark Moor, its salt-weed pungencies from the Bay of Bridgewater.

It dropped fragments and morsels of its burden now, all along the path of its eastern flight. It dropped some at Pylle, some at Evercreech, some at Wanstrow and Witham Friary, some at Great Bradley Wood, some at Long Leat Park. Wisps of what it carried floated down at all those little villages called by the name of Deverill. At Kingston Deverill, at Monkton Deverill, at Hill Deverill and at Longbridge Deverill little fragments were wafted to the ground.

The wind gathered more strength as it reached Old Willoughby Hedge and Chapel Field Barn. But it dropped some more of its burden at Two Mile Down and yet more of it among the ancient British villages and the high hili-turauli that surround Great Ridge and Stonehill Copse.

At last it arrived at Salisbury Plain; and it was natural enough that then, in those darkest hours of that long December night, it should sink down and fail.

But for Mr. Evans, at any rate, there would have been something significant that it should thus sink down and fail and find the end of its journey on the very spot where those “foreign stones” were deposited that must have followed, on their mysterious conveyance out of Wales, the self-same path across the heart of Somerset.

It would certainly have been Mr. Evans' opinion that whatever happened to the seaweed smells, and the dyke-mists, and the wild-fowl feathers, and the oak-apple dust, and the brackish marsh-vapours, the more psychic portion of this wind's aerial cargo would have been deposited at one place only—at the actual spot where the two great “Sarsen” monoliths have bowed down, during the centuries, and fallen prostrate, across the stone of “foreign origin” that is still the Altar Stone of Stonehenge.

CONSPIRACY

The Marriage of Mr. Owen Evans and Miss Cordelia Geard had already taken place; and it was in one of the little new town council houses in Old Wells Road that they had settled down, immediately after this event—Cordelia not being one to press Mr. Evans to spend his savings on a holiday just at the moment when Old Jones was coming to terms over the partnership in the shop.