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“If it wasn't for Owen having come, I'd have soon gone mad just like her!”

There was something so portentous about that head muffled in the black shawl—as if the woman had arrayed herself for some tragic event and were uttering words that could only be spoken from a shrouded face—that the girl found the shocking rags of Finn Toller a relief to look at in comparison.

But what were they talking about? These two queer ones had not met in that ruined place for the mere pleasure of meeting! Not from their murmuring voices, not from their dramatic gestures, but from a vibration in the whole atmosphere around them did Cordelia, as well as Mr. Evans, catch, without witting what it was, the revolting smell of a crime against human life.

But now came an interruption. A great fluffy barn-door owl, a galvanised bundle of soft feathers and precipitate alarm, roused by the heat of the fire, suddenly flung itself out of its day long retreat in one of these old walls, and whirled of! with a scream over the elder bush where the two onlookers were hidden. Catching sight of them there, it flew sideways with a sound so unusual that it caused Mad Bet to snatch the shawl from her head. Hurriedly, Mr. Evans pulled Cordelia back, and following an instinct, the childishness of which was natural to both of them, they retreated at a wild rush through the spruces and at a still faster pace down the slope of the hill!

It was not indeed until they reached their Scotch fir that he let her pause to take breath; and then, when between his laboured gasps he tried to kiss her as he had kissed her before, the same wild, horse-like, hysterical laugh broke from her lips. The sound was disquieting but it had the effect of soothing the nerves of her who uttered it. This queer couple resembled each other in the irrelevant and motiveless way they both were accustomed to burst out laughing. “Those two were up to some mischief, Owen,” murmured the girl. But Mr. Evans hurriedly veered from this grim topic.

“Where the guide books make their great mistake,” he said, as they now turned homeward, “is in treating Glastonbury as a fragment of history, instead of something that's making history. Your father's absolutely right. It's the future that's important”

Cordelia made no reply. It was always in relation to her father's ideas that she came nearest to losing her respect for Mr. Evans. As she felt this cool night wind blow against her face, and heard her leather boots creak with their familiar little creakings, and thought of the cake she had made yesterday for their tea today, and fumbled with the handle of Mr. Evans' stick as the next best thing to holding his hand, it seemed to her that this masculine desire to create some “important” future was one of the dreariest mockeries of human values that existed in the world.

“Keep us alive. Give us food. Give us love. Give us children. But take your 'important' Communisms and Capitalisms from around our waists and from about our necks!”

Thus would Cordelia have liked to have expressed herself if she could have found the right words. It would have been a satisfaction to scream out once in her life at the top of her lungs to her father, to her husband, to Dave Spear: "You are all a lot of babies with your curst politics!'' She would have liked John Crow to have been there too; and, if the moment had permitted it, she would have liked that odious wretch to have fallen in love with her, beyond measure, beyond restraint, and tried to kiss her, so that she could have slapped his face!

“Our good John said something yesterday that was very true,” Mr. Evans continued, stirred by an unconscious telepathy. “He said that a great many material things had certain little tricks of arranging themselves at certain times, as if they all shared in the process of some secret ritual to which we have lost the clue.” “Do you know what I'd like to do, Owen, when I hear that man talk in that sort of way?”

There was a tone in her voice that Mr. Evans had come to know too well and he had the wit to remain silent.

“I've annoyed her,” he said to himself, “by dragging her so fast away from Mad Bet. She doesn't know that I've lost interest in Mad Bet, now that she's stopped torturing herself and is just indulging herself. I'm not sure, after all, that she is the Grail Messenger. Cordy is more like the Grail Messenger than she is, but there's a tone in their voices that is very similar.”

He was totally oblivious of the fact that seriously to compare his wife with this lamentable creature had something monstrous about it. But in Mr. Evans' attitude to women there was an ob-tuseness that was almost ghastly. Certain human souls suffer from the psychic atrophy of a particular sympathy in regard to the opposite sex. Persephone Spear had a similar peculiarity, only in the inverse way. To Persephone no man was worthy of the least subtle consideration. Men to Percy were like fish, whose gills, though they could open and shut, had no feeling in them. The spirits of both Cordelia and Mr. Evans sank to a low ebb when they reached their row of red-tiled roofs, above Bove Town. This depression had something to do with a straggling line of little labouringmen's houses, newer even than their own—indeed not quite finished—which the town council was just now erecting for the workers in its souvenir factory.

Few things are more desolating to certain human moods than new uninhabited houses. In addition to this cause of gloom Mr. and Mrs. Evans were exhausted with their walk and longing for their tea; a refreshment that could not—in the nature of things —be ready for at least half an hour. But deep down below the surface it was not the new houses nor their craving for tea that made them depressed. It was the emanation reaching out towards them from that ruined sheepfold.

Parlour and kitchen were the only rooms on the ground floor of Five, Old Wells Road; and when he had unlocked the front door and entered the house, Mr. Evans went straight into the parlour and sank down in a big, ugly, purple arm-chair which stood there. Cordelia meanwhile hurried into the kitchen and began her preparations for tea before even taking off her hat. It was not indeed till she had laid the table, cut the bread for toast, and got out the butter—they ate all their meals in the kitchen—that she ran upstairs to wash her hands.

The troubled mood which had descended upon them both did not immediately lift, even after they had been within their walls for a quarter of an hour; and this was the first time in their brief experience of Old Wells Road that such a thing had occurred. Never before had Mr. Evans gone into the parlour in this way and plunged into the arm-chair Mr. Geard had given them without offering to help his wife get the meal! The armchair was the biggest that Mr. Wollop had had on sale, and it contrasted oddly with the rest of the furniture of their small house, which was certainly more picturesque than it was comfortable, being in fact almost all the unsalable things in Number Two's shop which had been lent to Mr. Evans by his partner.

The arm-chair was a purple one and a proud-looking one; and it had a lavender-coloured fringe round the bottom of it. It was with the tassels of this fringe that the long nervous fingers of Mr. Evans were now uneasily fumbling. He had lit the gas-jet on entering this room which was only separated from the kitchen by the narrowest of little passages, and he could now see through the open door Cordelia's shadow, thrown by the kitchen-lamp behind her, flickering about upon the floor of this passage.

Mr. Evans9 legs were stretched straight out on the new carpet; his muddy boots were resting on their extended heels; while the skin of his ankles exposed above his ruffled black socks looked curiously white and helpless in the glaring gas-light. His great aquiline nose drooped motionless above his chest and his arms hung down at his sides. His face was pale and he kept sucking at his cheeks in some queer manner which emphasised the prominence of his cheek-bones. His thoughts hovered around the forlorn happenings in the olden times that had left Launcelot du Lac to perish so miserably in that little chantry, hut these thoughts were affected and the man was not unaware of it, by what he felt, beyond any definite explanation, about that dialogue in the sheepf old.

“Launcelot's death,” he said to himself, “was one of the saddest things that have ever happened in tins unhappy world.” As he went on pondering upon this tall heroic lover*s decline and how he lost a cubit of his stature among those flesh-scourging monks, his eyes began to close, and that particular kind of drowsiness that comes to human beings when the pitiableness of all human affairs presses wearily upon them, weighed down his eyelids.

All human minds, as they move about over the face of the earth, are in touch with a dark reservoir of our race's psychic garbage. Just as all the thrilling and vibrating thoughts that have animated human organisms survive the deaths of these organisms, so all the heavy, cloddish, murderous, desolate thoughts, in which free will and faith and happiness perish like asphyxiated gnats, roll themselves in a foul torrent into a great invisible planetary Malebolge. This Malebolge is always present and near, a little way below the surface, for all our human minds; and it only needs certain occurrences, or certain arrangements of matter, to cause an odious and devastating effluvia from its surface-scum to invade the arteries of our consciousness.

Although their ignorance of wThat that sheepfold talk had been about forbade any discussion of it between them, yet some residue of it floated there above the purple arm-chair and hovered in that little kitchen above the stove, acting as an invoker of those blighting waters of Malebolge, and saturating Number Five, Old Wells Road with that sick and sour undersea of abhorrence which human thoughts in their malice and their weakness have created for their own torment.

By the middle of their tea, however, they both felt more cheerful. The self-protective will to forget licked up with its sorceress tongue all these poisonous emanations squirted forth from this underworld Malebolge. Up and down, like a beautiful coral-tinted tongue, that will to forget moved—as the magic fumes of the tea mounted to their heads—and very soon it had licked up every trace of those waters of hell!

Their conversation became excited, emotional, imaginative, as it usually was at tea-time; and it was with regret that they suddenly heard the sharp tinkle above their heads of the door-bell.

They both got up and moved simultaneously into the little passage. It fell to Cordelia to open the door and she let in, one by one, Dave Spear, Paul Trent, and Red Robinson. All the visitors professed roundly that they had had tea in the town. They even named the tea-shop, which was neither the worst nor the best available, being the little place kept by Mrs. Jones, the mother of Sally and Jackie and the sister of Mr. Evans' partner.

Cordelia did her best to find seats in the parlour for them all. She got Red safely disposed of in the purple chair, with Paul Trent balanced on its arm; and while she and her husband propped themselves up, as well as they could, on Number Two's ricketty antiques, Dave sat squarely down on a kitchen chair which he himself had carried in. This little touch of officious-ness on Dave's part—she didn't want any of them in the kitchen with the tea-things all about—had an instantaneous effect upon Cordelia's nerves which affected her whole attitude to the business on which the three men came. To the end of his days Dave would never learn the delicacy and charity of not meddling.

“Women ought not,” he would have said, “to be fussy about how their rooms look! Rooms are for human beings to sit in, when—protected from wind and darkness—they discuss how to improve the world.”

The three conspirators, whose plot, devised originally by Persephone, had become now a quite momentous and possibly even an historic affair, had been visiting so many Glastonbury houses in the last couple of weeks that they had come to use a sort of stage-method in dealing with people. This method had been invented by Paul Trent with a full understanding of the characters of Dave and Red; and what it really amounted to was that while he himself explained the statistics of the plan, he left Red to interject the revolutionary dynamite, and Dave the prophetic austerity. He was the lean Cassius of the plot: Dave the incorruptible Brutus; Red the vindictive Casca.

But of course this method was hardly required on this occasion, because rumours and murmurs and maledictions of the great plan had been rumbling and humming at every meal Cordv and Mr. Evans had recently shared at Cardiff Villa.

But such was the notorious absent-mindedness of Mr. Evans that Paul Trent felt justified in being as explicit with him as if he had never heard the subject discussed.

“We came in really,” he said, “only to tell you two that everything is moving according to our scheme.”

“Has Father decided to lend the council some money?” enquired Cordelia.

Paul Trent was too much of a diplomatist not to sense far-off the electric flicker of opposition. He made a feline movement on the arm of Red's big chair, as if he were a cat preparing to do battle.

“Nothing is decided yet,” he said. “We have only been discussing things.” '

“What does Mother say?”

For a second this question nonplussed the man from the Scilly Isles; for it pushed him out of his legal world into his philosophical world.

“I quite agree with you that a wife's wishes ought to be care, fully considered when it comes to any big investment but . * « I'm afraid ... in this case------”

“You mean she doesn't agree?” said Cordelia, “and I don't wonder either,” the girl went on, “she hasn't got the least benefit out of Canon Crow's money so far—and now it's all going to be thrown away!”

Paul Trent leant forward with a flush upon his swarthy cheek and a contraction of his arched eyebrows.

“Not thrown away, lady!” he murmured softly, “not thrown away! He'll still be by far the richest man in Glastonbury.”

Cordelia uttered a spasmodic little laugh, a laugh which caused Mr. Evans to give her a grave and anxious glance.

“Your father,” interjected Dave, “—and your mother knows that perfectly well—would never touch a penny of his fortune for anything but the good of------”

“ 'Ee'Il be the biggest stockholder in our commune, Miss Cordy,” remarked Red Robinson, “and 'is will be the only nime what'll be in all the pipers.”