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Indeed with the departure of the head of the Zoyland family a strange and uncanny irritation seized that whole group of people, an irritation that seemed to flow like an evil electricity from kitchen to parlour, and from parlour back again to kitchen. The little golden christening cup, with the Zoyland falcon on it, which the Marquis had brought, became now the innocent cause of a violent quarrel between Zookey and Sally Jones.

Nell had brought the cup in to show them, as soon as the dogcart had driven off, and Sally had said that Uncle Bart had told her long ago about that gold cup and that Miss Crummie had wanted to see it, but Miss Cordy, what's now Mrs. Evans—had said 'tweren't right “to show things to people unless people were thinking of buying things.”

It was then that Zookey had rudely remarked:

“Thik wold Number Two do blurt out lies as fast as his lungs do pant. I reckon he thought thik cup were common silver-plate till Mr. Evans told 'un 'twere gold.”

To this insult Sally had replied in an incoherent rush of words, the drift of which was that she had heard Mr. Geard tell Mrs. Geard that if he were blessed by Providence to find his dear Lord's cup, there'd be something in Glaston that would divide lies from truth forevermore. “And that,” Sally had added fiercely, “that would be the last of thee, and of thee's devil's tongue!”

“Ye'll be saying next that his Lordship's gold cup,” retorted Zookey, "with his Lordship's wone trade-mark on it, be the Mayor's cup. That comes of letting Red Robinson take 'ee, where no decent woman should be took! I've a seed ye two, sneaking whoam at night down Chilkwell Street and if thee don't mind thee's manners, I'll let the Mayor know thee do go round town, telling tales of what he says to his Missus, when none be byP

Nell had gone upsairs by this time to suckle little Henry; Zookey was clearing away the tea-things in the parlour; Zoyland and Percy were standing together by the nearest pollard willow in the direction of that deep weir, into the waters of which, on the occasion of Mat Dekker's first appearance here last March, Sam had been so strongly tempted to fling his bearded rival.

Dave Spear, using Percy's little motor car for this purpose, was occupying, himself by patiently driving, in two successive trips, first one party and then another of the proletarian guests to their various homes in the town. He took Mother Legge and Tittie first. Then, on his return, he took Abel Twig, Nancy Stickles and Sally Jones, Sally sitting on Nancy's lap. This occupied him altogether, with the inevitable lingering conversations in doorways, nearly a whole hour; and thus it was getting on for seven o'clock when he finally found himself turning out the lights of his machine on that gravel patch at the back door, upon which lay the wholesome-smelling droppings of the black horse from Mark's Court.

Entering the kitchen by that well-oiled outer door that Doxy Pippard had found so serviceable, he discovered Doxy's mother laboriously coping with an enormous pile of dirty dishes. Will had purchased at the last moment, in the china department at Wollop's, a number of cheap tea-cups and plates that Nell had cordially disliked, but that Zookey, hearing the altercation about them, cast an envious eye upon, regarding them as a possible perquisite. These new cups and plates, although not to be compared for intrinsic beauty with Nell's own collection, possessed for Zookey a far greater value than these, just because there hung over them this vague premonitory glamour of future ownership. Without doing it deliberately Zookey broke two of Nell's nicest cups, treasured relics of the quiet Spear family, objects that bore no predatory falcon upon their gilt-bordered whiteness; but not one of these new “Wollop things” did she so much as crack, partly because of their sturdier substance, but also because in her acquisitive mind, they were destined for her own dresser in Bove Town. After standing to chat for a few minutes with Mrs. Pip-pard, a friendly gesture that was rewarded by several wickedly barbed pieces of information (“Parson can't hang over Missus long enough, when she have child at breast,” being one of these, and “Thee's preety lady and the Master do seem to like thik dark river-bank” being another and “ 'Twere wondrous to see how Auntie Legge's eyes did shine when gold cup were on lap” being a third) Dave Spear pushed open the door and went into the parlour. Here he found an aura of such forlorn emptiness and hushed sterility that even his vigorous and phlegmatic nerves were affected by it.

Nell—or Mat Dekker when he went up to Nell—had blown out all the candles save one and the first thing Dave did was to light two more. All three at his elbow on the table, he sat down to. read and to smoke, taking both book and pipe from his own capacious pocket. A treatise upon the Lost Atlantis it was that Dave produced and it interested him as an imaginative picture of an ancient communistic state.

A certain interior feeling, however, of quite another order than any emotional reaction to wife or sister, refused to be stilled by his reading. This feeling was that of extreme hunger. Dave had had no lunch; and the thin bread and butter and scotch scones of their tea had been devoured so quickly by Zoyland and Mr. Dekker that before their economic dispute began he had had only a nibble at them; and once launched into his argument he had naturally forgotten such a personal thing as a craving for food.

Most of the pathetic scenes in almost everybody's life are scenes unnoted by anyone and totally disregarded by the person in question. Such was this moment in Dave's life; when, with his head full of the signing of those documents at Mark Court, he was pondering on these legends and rumours of Atlantis in connexion with his historic experiment in Glastonbury, and all the time wondering against his will whether Zookey intended to cook them any supper.

He was successful in rigidly keeping out of his mind every image of Dekker bending over Nell in the room above, and of Zoyland bending over Percy in the darkness outside; but as his three candles flickered upon these legends of the drowned continent, he could not prevent his thoughts from running upon baked potatoes and gravy.

Twice, while Dave had been reading his book on Atlantis, and thinking against his will about potatoes and gravy, Percy came straight up to the window outside where those brown curtains were, and peeped in upon him. Being the man's wife, and yet with no essential kindness for him, the girl when she saw him there did not feel the least sense of the pathos of that short flaxen-haired figure, with its schoolboy earnestness, turning the pages of “Atlantis” and every now and then making a pencil-note in the margin of the book. Thinking himself completely alone in that candlelit room Dave gave way to a childish trick, that his dead mother had long ago tried to cure him of—a trick of sucking his upper lip, and pulling it as far as it would go, into his mouth, while he licked it with the tip of his tongue. But Percy, while she had grown so familiar with his ways as to take them all for granted and while she had come to value his opinions so as to accept them for her own, felt toward him not one single kindly human feeling.

“There he is—reading that book!” she had said to herself the first time she peeped in. “How his ears do stick out!” And the second time she peeped in, it was much the same.

“There he is—still reading!” she thought. “How insensitive his hands are!”

Will Zoyland had not yet forgiven Nell for his humiliation of last night. He had agreed to the precipitate departure of Eu-doxia; but there had been no reconciliation between himself and Nell ... in fact very few words of any kind had passed between them since he had carried her bodily up the attic stairs to spare the feelings of Miss Pippard.

Aggravated rather than appeased by his protracted dalliance with Doxy, Zoyland's senses were irritably on edge after his long summer of celibate virtue.

The electric response of Persephone to his careless courtship— for, as we have discovered, to excite a man's desire to the point of desperation was a recurrent aspect of this singular girl's perversity—very quickly heightened this rebellious wantonness into a leaping flame of desire. Nell's unforgivingness over the trifling incident of Eudoxia rankled in the bastard's mind as something extraordinarily unfair. Here was he playing the wittol for Nell's sake and what was she doing in return? He couldn't blame her for being absorbed in her maternity; but she might at least have been indulgent to his natural and pardonable lapse.

As he pulled Percy away from the parlour window after her second spying upon her husband, he glanced up at the window of the attic and noted by the faint light there that she had only lit one of her bedroom candles. He could hear no sound of the Vicar's deep voice either; and he thought to himself, “The Padre is holding her hand and rocking the cradle—a pretty family picture! But where do I come in?”

Will's complaisance over the child was, if he had troubled to analyse it, more for the baby's sake than its mother's. His rich animal nature—the lavish temperament of a born outlaw—responded exuberantly to the helplessness of babyhood. He found Henry sweet to his taste; but if a wandering gipsy-woman had left a foundling on his doorstep he would have made the same kind of pet of it.

The little golden christening-cup, having been handed here and there between parlour and kitchen, and now reposing in peace at the foot of Henry's cradle, had been an added cause of annoyance between Zoyland and Nell. The girl had expressed a desire to have the baby's name engraved on the cup, but this had seemed to William a paltry, middle-class addition. Did not the cup already carry the proud falcon of his race? Thus there had been yet more bitter words between them on this head, which added still further to the rankling score of grievance.

“Come on, sweet one,” he now whispered, dragging Persephone away, from the house towards the tow-path and this time in an easterly direction. “They don't want us in there. He's plotting revolution, and they're plotting sentiment! We're out of it tonight, you and I; and we'd better make the best of being out of it!”

Percy had always enjoyed flirting with Zoyland, but they were both in a completely different mood tonight. . . . They were both in the same mood too, by some fatality; which always means a vibration between men and women full of delicious danger.

'“Is it possible” her incorrigible spirit pondered, uthat this man is going to do what Phil and Dave couldn't do? This is a glorious moment anyway. I wish it could last foreverI*'

The half-moon, looking water-logged and labouring, like a rudderless ship, in the mottled sky. poured down a stream of ambiguous influence upon the swollen river. Too many feminine nerves, of every level of organic life, wTere draining just then that strange Being's vitality, so that the magic touch that fell upon Percy's relaxed limbs as Zoyland dragged her along by the hand, was a mere accidental overflow; casual, uncalculated. It gave enough light however to guide their steps as they followed the tow-path; and the whole nature of that night was such that nothing emphatic or arresting in the elements distracted their attention from each other.

“He willing and she willing,” as Homer says, they speedily receded out of all sight of the cottage.

The truth is that women like Nell, absorbed in their motherhood, and men like Dave, absorbed in their politics, will to the end of time throw into each other's arms reckless, restless, irresponsible, wandering stars, like Percy and Zoyland. It is upon these strangely neutral nights, such as was this fifteenth of December, that the real power of darkness as opposed to daylight gathers itself together to assert its essential identity. Complete darkness is usually so empty of all discrimination as to be practically a negation; but darkness faintly touched by a sickly moon has a certain positive character. The absence of high wind or pouring rain, too, enables the mind to receive, in uninterrupted concentration, those simpler emanations of earth-life, such as the leap of a fish, the rustling of a rabbit, the cry of a nocturnal bird, the bark of a farm-dog, the lowing of a cow in an isolated barton, the faint soughing of reeds, the creaking of a bough, the fall of a twig into a silent pond, the shy stirrings of aimless little night-winds amid the dead bracken, which are destroyed and obliterated by the more startling play of the elements.

Zoyland paused only once in his predatory stride and that was to make the girl lean on his arm in place of holding his hand.

She was indeed following him so gallantly and with such an easy swing over the muddy ground that he felt proud of her as a companion. The truth was that in a rough-and-tumble country walk, Percy, for all her sophistication, would have beaten any woman in Glastonbury except her cousin Mary. It was perhaps the vigorous Norfolk strain in their blood. But whatever it was, no Glastonbury-born girl could have rivalled these two in this. Further and further eastward he led her; for he knew well by this time what he had in his mind.

What he was aiming at, and he found it without any trouble, was a spot that had always made him think of just this very contingency though not necessarily with his present lady! About half a mile from Whitelake Cottage there was a reed-thatched shed where the farmer of those fields kept his dry hay. The fields on both sides of the stream belonged to this man just there; and in order to convey his hay across to his cattle on the opposite bank he kept a fiat-bottomed boat tied by a rope to an iron stake, beneath this hayshed. Zoyland had made use of this boat many a time before, and without leave asked either, for the purpose of shooting wild fowl; and it now entered his mind that nothing could be more congruous with the hour and the girl than to embrace his present delicious companion where the waters of the river would be flowing within an inch of their bodies.

Percy laughed aloud—a low, merry, young-girl's laugh of pure mischief—when she found herself laid upon a mattress of hay in this floating bed. Her mind flew to that grey strip of subterranean shingle under the Witch of Wookey. Her only desire now—and even that was a languid one—was to put off her final yielding to the bearded man until she had enjoyed to the extreme limit the excited tension of his craving.

“How queer it is, in my life,” she thought to herself, “the way the same situation keeps repeating itself! Is it possible that that Bristol Wharf”—she was thinking of her early encounters with Dave—“and Wookey Hole, and Saint Mary's Ruin,”—she was thinking of one particular meeting with Angela Beere—“and that room in the hospital”—she was thinking of the last of her morbid visits to Mr. Evans—“were all rehearsals of this breaking of the ice with Will? When a person's life repeats itself— from that shore of Phil's to this boat of Will's!—there's a doom of some sort in it. He may be able to do it. He may I Will I Cant you do it? Cant you show poor Percy where her heart is? Oh, find it, oh, find it, darling Will! Touch it, hurt it, bruise it, break it! So long as you show her where it is—poor Percy's lost treacherous heart—that she can never, never, never find!”