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Eudoxia Pippard, when she finally appeared in response to her crafty parent's beguiling hints, completely turned Will Zoy-land's head.

Having lived a chaste life for nearly half a year and having recognised the fact that he had been made the bread-winner for another man's child, Zoyland found nothing in his passion for Nell's baby to prevent him from committing delicious adultery with Doxy Pippard. Eudoxia was indeed dedicated, it seemed, to give immoral delight to Lord P.'s bastard.

She was not at all what you would call a pretty girl. Her lips were much too thin, her nose wTas a little twisted to one side and her neck was decidedly too long; but she had one peculiarity which, as soon as he discovered it, set Zoyland's Varangian senses on fire, and that was the most satiny skin that ever a Glastonbury amorist had clipped, as Malory would say, since the days of the damosel Linet, of the Castle Perilous! It may be easily that, in the category of feminine desirability, such polished flanks, such slippery knees, such satiny hips, and all such other sinuous slen-dernesses, do not by any means constitute what is called “classical beauty” or even romantic charm; but whatever they constitute, as they slide in or out of a seducer's arms they evoke a ravishing and transporting satisfaction.

Now there was an outside wooden staircase at the back of the house, leading into the ante-room of the “smoking-room”; so that when Nell and Sam's child were fast asleep, in the front of the house, Eudoxia could easily come in through the kitchen door. This door, if Zookey remembered to leave it aj ar, had well-oiled hinges; so that when Doxy found herself—at first with agitated surprise, but later with entrancing coquetry—clothed only in her night-gown and in the presence of the master of the house, lying upon his couch bed, there was no danger of surprisal if they spoke in low whispers.

Now Nell, although Zoyland had loved her dearly and had got great enjoyment from her, had never been really responsive to his embraces. Her body had responded faintly, her heart a little, but her inmost imaginative nerve, the crucial chord to the essential quiver of a girl's stirred senses, not at all. The full-blooded bastard, as may well be believed, had had many loves before he became infatuated with Nell Spear, but none of these had been adepts at the art of provocation, none of these had been viciously exciting.

Now Doxy Pippard possessed, among other original characteristics, a curious mania for retaining her virginity. Vicious and inflammable as she was with the feverish, reckless, almost swooning intensity of the pseudo-consumptive type, she had lavished her nervous provocations on all her men and yet had managed matters so skilfully as to be a maiden still. The mere idea of lying in the arms of the son of the Marquis of P. was intoxicating to the romantic yearning in her snake-smooth, leaf-cool body; while the herculean proportions of Zoyland as a human being fulfilled all her secretest girlhood's dreams as to what a real masculine bedfellow should be.

On the eve of the day of the christening Eudoxia had come down to him soon after midnight, entering the kitchen by the door left unlatched by Zookey; and it was after a couple of hours of paradisiac dalliance, wherein her protection of herself from “mortal sin” prolonged her companion's tantalised delight beyond what he would have dreamed possible, that the couple sat up suddenly on that single-pillowed couch-bed under the heavily curtained window and started to listen with all their ears. What had disturbed them was an outburst of crying from the child, followed by Nell's voice calling Will's name. It is probable that no possible re-arrangements of society—not even that most ideal commune pictured by Paul Trent—will ever bring it about that the fear of discovery in erotic infidelities will be abolished. Such “alarums and excursions,” such panic-stricken beatings of the heart, seem as deeply implicit in the fatality of human relations as is the indestructibleness of jealousy itself.

Zoyland had already thrown one of his herculean limbs out of bed; and with his heel on the floor was clutching the bed-clothes, preparatory to obeying his wife's summons, when Eudoxia, wTho had curled up her supple slenderness like a frightened grass-snake, close under the window-sill, heard Zookey's voice reassur-ring both mother and child.

“There's Mother!” she whispered. She was right. For once, it seemed, the old woman's influence had succeeded with the headstrong baby; for they heard its shrill cries die down now; and soon after they could catch the creaking of the heavy shoes she wore and* the drag of her lame foot—for Zookey suffered from eczema and the chief ornament on her extemporised toilet-table, which was a big black trunk with NelPs maiden initials on it, was a great china pot of zinc ointment—as she returned into the ante-room.

Even his herculean capacity for amorous play being exhausted, and this alarm having roused them both to extreme wakefulness, Zoyland and Miss Pippard fell to talking in low whispers.

A luminous half-moon, disencumbered tonight of those eternally eastward-travelling clouds, threw a silvery streani between the brown curtains of their window; a stream which fell on the man's bushy beard and on the girl's old-fashioned night-gown and on her slippers tossed down upon the floor. In his rough eagerness, Zoyland had torn away the top button from the front of this gown, and the girl's long thin neck protruded wantonly and weirdly; sometimes entering that ray of moonlight and sometimes receding from it, like a slender birch-trunk surrounded by swaying bracken. Close beside Miss Pippard's faded blue slippers Zoyland had thrown down his own muddy boots, one of which lay on its side, contented and at ease, in that little pool of moonlight, while the other, left in the outer darkness, stared sadly at the ceiling.

They were both sitting up in the bed, their backs against the western wall of the cottage, while the stream of moonlight entering on their right hand and illuminating the girl's neck and the fringe of his beard, left their upraised knees, over which the rumpled bed-clothes extended in confusion, partly in light and partly in shadow. One of his arms was hanging loosely over the edge of the couch while the other, flung round her waist and against her bare side was teasing his tired senses with an aftermath of delicate tantalisation. As he rested there, Will Zoyland felt extremely grateful to Miss Pippard for the pleasure she had given him and for the pleasure she was still suffusing through every nerve of his deliciously lethargic frame. Sexual gratitude is an emotion much less frequent in modern days than in mediaeval times, owing to the fact that industrialism has cheapened the value of the sex-thrill by lowering the ritual-walls surrounding it. In modern times it needs a profoundly magnanimous and even quixotic nature to feel this emotion to any extreme degree. It is doubtless this absence of sexual gratitude that accounts for the cold-blooded and savage hatred that so many separated couples feel for each other today; and the furious vindictiveness of their disputes over money. But it is a sign of meanness in a man or a woman, and of a certain thinness of character, when such gratitude is so quickly forgotten. A large nature may find it necessary to hit fiercely back; may find it necessary to escape altogether: but even in its retorts, even in its avoidance, it retains a certain fundamental tenderness and indulgence, based upon physical gratitude for the thrilling sensations of the past.

It was largely his over-brimming gratitude to Nell for the thrills which he had got from the touch of her body that had made Zoyland so indulgent in the matter of Sam. Men that sail the sea are as a rule, by reason of their isolation from women, more grateful to them for their favours than landsmen are. A jealous peasant, a jealous tradesman is much more common than a jealous sailor; and though Lord P.'s bastard had never sailed the sea, his Norse ancestors had, and that manner of life lay deep in his blood.

Miss Pippard was a complete stranger to Will Zoyland; and, for this very reason, the fact that the shuffling of life's cards—or as some would say, the machinations of Zookey—had given him the thrilling privilege of enjoying the satiny texture, cool and slippery as the leaves of waterlilies, of the girl's limbs, endowed their moonlit whispers with a piquancy as delicate and exalted as a bird's song or a butterfly's flight in a monastic cloister.

“I'm glad your mother's asked Mother Legge tomorrow,” whispered Will, “for I've always had a fancy for that old lady. She's a classic figure, if you know what I mean, my dear. My father used to say she made him think of a whore-mistress in Rome.” “Is it true, Mr. Zoyland,” came a faint response from the white figure at his side, “that the Mayor of Glaston cured poor Tittie of a killing cancer?”

“God! my dear, / don't know! I've been out at Wookey all the autumn. Perhaps it wasn't cancer at all. You'd better ask her tomorrow and see what she says. / wouldn't go to that pious old humbug, if I had the worst cancer ever known. I'd shoot myself first.”

“They say there'll be rare doings,” went on Miss Pippard, offering as she spoke just the kind of resistance to his caresses that enhanced their value while it did not waylay their direction, “when Mr. Geard opens his new arch on Chalice Hill. They say they foreigners be due to come in trainloads to see 'um. I were out at Moorleaze, by Witham Friary, on Pageant Day. Missus went to it, and so did the childer; but Master kept I by 'un, to-------” She interrupted herself with a little click of her tongue against her teeth. This sound usually denotes some gentle disaster when uttered by a young girl. In the case of Miss Pippard it denoted an indulgent awareness of amorous advances.

“To play in the hayloft with him?” whispered Zoyland.

“There were a lot o' new goslings,” Eudoxia continued gravely, “out there by Croft Pond; and I were the only maid in Dairy what he trusted wi' they. Old Madge Dill was too rheumatic to cross barton. She be the one I told 'ee about, Mr. Zoyland, what got the rheumatiz, from picking watercress.”

“I remember, sweetheart,” whispered Zoyland. “She was the one who stinted you in butter till you scared her by that tale of the corpse candles.”

“So she was,” sighed Eudoxia, “and arter that tale I were the richest-nourished woman in Mid-Somerset. I wish often—and sweet Jesus do know I wish it now I—that Mother had never made me leave that good place. Master often would say I were the deftest maid for smelling out mushrooms that he'd ever seen. He often said that when I married he'd give me a solid gold bracelet wi' filgree lacework on 'en.” Thus whispered Eudoxia and sighed heavily.

She gave her bed-fellow plenty of time to meditate on the lavish liberality of Moorleaze and upon ways and means of rivalling it. Then she sighed again.

“I'd like Mother to try if the Mayor's Miracle Spring on Chalice Hill could cure her eczema.” This pious wish was breathed into the moonlight with intense gravity. And then, even at the very moment when her resistance to her seducer's one-handed caresses perceptibly slackened, she added in a still graver whisper:

“It makes her toes itch terrible—poor Mother! I'd give half a year's wages to ease her of thiccy devil's smart!”

Zoyland's lechery was of a very subdued kind just now, so he could afford to moralise at this moment to any extent. “Sometimes,” he said to himself, “these girls seem to have no nervous system at all. They can respond without responding, and think of God knows what! If anyone asked me ^hat I valued most in a woman I'd say attention! It's like dealing with a creature that's half an animal and half an angel. The larger part of your talk, of your love-making, of your ideas, of your thoughts, pass over them like water off a duck's back!” He had arrived at this finale in his meditations when the girl suddenly stiffened herself like a galvanic wire and shrank against the brown curtain, pulling the bed-clothes over her head. Zoyland had time to catch one faint rustle on the staircase leading to the bedroom above, and one slight creaking of the bannister; but he had no sooner leapt out of bed and stumbled over the girl's slippers, than the door at tte foot of the staircase was flung cpen, and Nell—in her blue dressing-gown and with a flat silver candlestick in her hand— stepped into the room.

To the end of his days Zoyland remembered the expression of Nell's face. Her eyes were gleaming with a fierce, hard, bright lustre when she first came in; but as she raised her candle one side of her features was blotted out in shadow.

“Aren't you ashamed of yourselves?” she cried in a clear ringing voice, and with a hand that he could see was neither trembling nor shaking she carried the candle into the middle of the room and laid it on the little green card-table, pushing a vase of small-flowering chrysanthemums that stood there out of the way with the candlestick rim.

The bearded man, looking very tall and formidable in the candlelight, held his ground and remained with his massive legs firmly planted on the rug, his bare feet widely apart, his flannel shirt hanging loose over his bare thighs. But Nell came right up to him and with an imperious gesture with her hand made as if she would push him out of the way as she went to the couch to confront Miss Pippard. Not being able to do this and apparently surprised at the man's imperturbable sangfroid, Nell made a step sideways toward the wall on her left and called out to the huddled figure on the couch.

“Aren't you ashamed of yourself, Eudoxia? Aren't you ashamed to treat me like this and your mother upstairs too; and me with little Harry? I can't understand you, Eudoxia. I can't understand how you could do such a thing!”

While Nell was thus expressing her indignation to the form on the couch, Zoyland's mind was rapidly considering two alternative lines of action. Should he pick up his clothes, which lay there, piled up on a wicker chair, near the bookcase—that bookcase that contained the massive volumes of Arabia Deserta—and retire with them to his “smoking-room,” leaving Eudoxia to the mercy of Nell? Or should he, by hook or by crook, compel his wife to go back to her bedroom and her child? Huntsman as he was, Will had only to decide on the line to take, and he would follow it up recklessly and defiantly. Up to this point, Nell, in her righteous anger, had had the whiphand over both of them. But Zoyland's one clear instinct now was to save Miss Pip-pard from further humiliation. Lovely though Nell looked in her blue dressing-gown, the banked-up righteousness of her indignation seemed to have changed her personality in a very subtle way. Zoyland could not help experiencing a queer shock when he saw how this gross incursion had dragged the beautiful girl into the role of jealous, sport-spoiling domesticity, wherein it is hard for any woman to play an attractive part.