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Heavily and awkwardly and all hunched up, his broad back stooping as if a weight beyond what he could bear had been laid upon it, Mr. Geard now began shambling down from the platform. Having reached the ground he stood for a time with his whole massive body bent forward, and his eyes tightly shut. At last, waving his hand every now and then to keep away anyone who approached him, he moved slowly down the slope towards the road.

There were so many conflicting accounts of what now happened, that a compilation of them all, and a comparison of them with one another, would leave upon the mind a feeling that certain great human events do not occur in a direct, clear-cut absolute manner; but include a wavering margin of actuality which changes in accordance with the human medium through which it passes.

As he came down the hill, the bulk of the people remained perfectly motionless, save for an attempt to pursue him with their eyes. He seemed protected, isolated, defended from intrusion by some interior power.

It was not long, however, before a little group of devotees who were now pushing their way towards him made a kind of half-circle round him; but even these did not dare to speak to him or approach him closely. There had been a great many references in European newspapers of late, to the Mayor's desire to make of Glastonbury a sort of, English Lourdes, where an atmosphere of miraculous healing is charged with the electricity of Faith, and everyone present felt that something momentous was in the air. But it was not only sick people who were now awaiting this man in the road below.

There always had lingered among the natives of Glastonbury, an obstinate notion that their Grail Spring possessed healing qualities; and no doubt Ned Athling's writings in the Wayfarer had played upon this obscure belief and stirred it up. At any rate it is certain that there had spread through Paradise and Bove Town a rumour that the Mayor wanted all the Glastonbury sick people, who could possibly be moved, to come to the Grail Fount that day; and along with these sick people Something Else had been carried to the foot of Chalice Hill, Something that now-awaited him there.

Moving straight" towards this small dead form, carried upon a stretcher, while the sick people—none of whom was seriously ill —forgot their own condition as they watched him, Mr. Geard followed the example of the prophet in the Old Testament and stretched himself upon the wooden bier, covering the dead child's body with his own. The man's disciples while he did this kept the child's relatives from approaching, all except the mother, whose hands as she knelt pressed the child's feet to her breast . . .

What sceptics said afterwards was that no doctor had seen the child since he died; and what the parents had mistaken for death was in reality a death-like trance, from which the exceptional animal-magnetism of the Mayor's heavy form naturally aroused him. This was the view taken of the incident by Dr. Fell, who came upon the scene soon after the child revived. Meanwhile— inside the Rotunda—John Crow was coming to his senses. When he did so he found his friend Tom bending over him, and Tom's overcoat spread out across his legs.

“You're shivering, Tom!” he whispered.

Barter made a wry face at him. “You haven't seen what Fve just seen, or you wouldn't be surprised if my teeth were chattering.”

John sighed. He made a weak motion with his hand. “What's up? What's he doing now?”

Barter realised that he was talking about Geard; and without delay he poured out his extraordinary story.

“It's that little boy who died this morning. They brought him on a stretcher. I saw the kid once myself. His mother's a drunken bitch, who lived in my house. I knew wTho it was the moment I heard the woman's voice. Two terrible old trots, Betsy Burt and Mrs. Carey, were with her when I saw the child then; and they were with her just now. They all lived in my house. I fetched the doctor once for this child myself. Dr. Fell said it was a sort of epilepsy.”

"Did he know they'd brought him, before he made his speech?55

Barter cast a hurried glance round the edifice in which they were holding this intense and strange conversation. In his mind there was the dim thought that there is something monstrous and horrible about bringing the dead to life; something that interferes with Nature and has an obscure and shocking profanity in it. He stared at what was around them in this queer building. It was crowded with litter and scaffolding, for it was but half finished; but there was a peculiar personal quality in the workmanship and in the materials, that separated it from all the newly erected buildings that he had ever seen.

“It might be something erected to Geard,” he thought, “rather than by Geard!”

“Did he know they'd brought him, Tom?”

“How do / know what he knew? You know him better than I.”

“I don't believe he knew,” whispered John.

They were both silent then and something very peculiar passed between them. There are certain topics which resemble certain substances in the world, such as blood and semen and the liquefaction of decomposition, in that they trouble some unique nerve in human mortality and produce, even in the naming, a peculiar frisson. Such a frisson they experienced now, and as they gazed in each other's faces in this dim, littered, empty place; these two cynical East-Anglians felt like dogs who had met an absolutely new smell; dogs, let us say, who are sniffing at a new-fallen meteorite!

“Dead? White and stiff and with that look, was he? And did old Geard------”

Barter nodded like a China-mandarin. “Yes, old cock, yes, my sweet cod, Geard did ii------”

"Brought it to life?*'

“Yes, old top-knot! To life, old white-face!”

"Where's Tossie?*'

"She's with Miss Crow and Lady Rachel/'

They were both silent then for a while; and during their silence the uttermost mystery of the world, that unspeakable coldness, stiffness, stillness of an organism that has lived and breathed, and now has been changed into something else held them by the throat.

“This child,” they both thought, “has been behind life, and if it could only remember what that Something Else------”

“Where are those two who were here?”

“Sheperd and Mr. Merry?”

“Were they here?”

'They've gone to look at the child."

“They'll kill it again, crowding round it.”

“Do you know what / think, John? I think the whole thing has been------”

Barter was going to say “planned,” but once more that shivering took him; and in his mind he saw that ghastly rigor mortis which holds the secret of the universe.

John made a desperate struggle to get up. “I'd like to see that child,” he murmured, rising on his elbow, “I'd like to see someone who has really been dead.”

“Dead, old cock; but not buriedl Cataleptic, old man!”

“I can't breathe properly,” groaned John. “I feel as weak as a baby. I wish you'd get him to come to me.”

“Shut up, you fool! You 11 be all right in a jiffy.”

“Water,” moaned John. “If I don't have a drop of water, I'll go off again.”

“The child was sitting up on the stretcher. They were feeding it!”

“Water,” moaned John, “water.”

Barter gave one more hurried glance at the strange interior around them. Then he went out quickly into the air. Hurrying under the Saxon arch—the irony of fate thus brought it about that the first two persons to use that new entrance were Philip and his ex-manager—lie filled one of the little cups that were kept there and brought it to his friend.

“Chalybeate,” he said with a leer, as John satisfied his craving and showed signs of recovery, “or Christ's Precious Blood; you can toss up which it is!”

The prostrate man jerked himself up on his elbow, and stared at the Rotunda door which Tom had left open.

“I'd like to know,” he muttered, "what dreams that child had!M

Barter gave vent to a quick welcoming shout and ran again to the door.

“What's up now?” sighed John, subsiding into his former position. “Is he coming?”

“He? He's in the town by now. It's Toss, I tell you. Hullo! Hullo! Here he is! Here we are!”

But John Crow was not the only unbeliever in Glastonbury to be confronted with the inexplicable that eventful twentieth of January. The Marquis of P., making his way to the snug little lodging above the offices of the Wayfarer, where Ned Athling had his rooms, wondered to himself as he went along whether after all he was well advised to pay a surprise visit, at ten o'clock at night, to his daughter's lover. He had dined at the Pilgrims', where Sergeant Blimp had put up as usual the famous green-wheeled dog-cart, and warmed by a bottle of first-rate port, sipped in company with his old servant in the quiet room he always occupied, he had resolved to make a frontal attack upon this troubler of the Zoyland pride.

“If they're not married, I don't care,” he said to himself. “Sister will have to swallow it I'm not going to quarrel with the girl for Betsy's sake.”

It was easier to find the place at that hour of the night than to discover how to get into Athling's room when he had found it. What a shabby down-and-out location for the Mayor's official newspaper!

But one of the battered doors opened easily to his hand, though there was no bell or knocker. Groping about inside a dark passage Lord P. began to feel more like a nervous burglar than like an indignant peer of the realm pursuing his daughter's seducer,

"Athling! Athling P he called out in a voice a good deal less authoritative and formidable than he would have liked it to be.

There was no response; and, since he had shut the street door, there wTas not even light enough to see whether he had to ascend a staircase, or rap at some chamber, in this musty passage.

“Damn the young idiot !” muttered the Marquis. '"Why the devil don't he keep a light in this place?*'

Annoyance increased the power of his voice.

"Athling! Athlingr

A door did open now, at the top of a straight flight of broad, bare, old-fashioned steps. A bright ray of light, from inside a warm, mellow, glowing room, streamed down the staircase. A girlish figure, obviously in a night-dress and dressing-gown, stood in the entrance of the room.

“Why it's Dad!” cried Lady Rachel in a low, soft, rich voice. “It's Dad, Ned!” she repeated, turning half-round as the amazed peer with an indrawn gasp of his breath and a muttered, “Well, I'll be damned!” gravely ascended the staircase.

“How siveet of you to come and see us!” she cried, in the same low, rich-laughing, self-composed manner.

The Marquis bowed to the young man who in a rough twTeed suit had clearly just risen up from beside a table covered with sheets of manuscript. The room was lighted by a dim rose-shaded lamp. A pleasant fire burned in the grate; and an open door, leading out of the back of the room, revealed a double-bed, with the white sheets turned down, and a second cheerful fire, in a sort of alcove.

“Sit down, Dad,” said Lady Rachel, offering her speechless parent a low wicker chair close to the hearth.

“Get some of that cherry brandy for my father, Ned.” Athling, whose hands were trembling with nervousness, lifted down from a shelf a beautiful little decanter made of fine cut-glass of a greenish tint. He spilled quite a lot of the gleaming cordial as he poured it and it was running down the edge of the tiny glass over hi3 own fingers as he handed it to the Marquis. Lord P. declined it with a wave of his hand. “Just had a bottle of wine,” he said. “Blimp ferreted it out for me. I'll have a cigarette though, if you've got one anywhere.”

As he spoke he allowed his eyes to roam over the walls of the room. They were adorned with nothing but a great number of striking water-colour sketches, all of them painted in a very peculiar and extremely unusual manner.

Lord P. was something of a virtuoso in this kind; and in spite of the dumbfounded condition of his nerves he mechanically got up and approached some of the more remarkable of these pictures.

“Damned good!” he muttered. “Which of you children did these things?”

“They're all Ned's!” cried the girl eagerly. “They're lovely, aren't they?”

“I should . . . say . . . they are.” He went solemnly round the room, carefully examining each one of these singular productions. As he did so, turning his back to both of them, he thought to himself: “Betsy needn't know anything about it. They're not married. She's sure to get tired of him after a bit. I suppose they understand about contraception.”

And he found himself slipping into an imaginary conversation with his friend Godfrey Bent at his club.

“My daughter's picked up with an artist-chap, you know the sort of thing, down there in the country. An old family, they tell me, one of the oldest in the county, but not a brass farthing. Can't you get him a show of some sort, Godfrey, next season? They're damned good, his things. They really might make a hit if they had half a chance!”

When he turned round and took his place again at the fire he regarded the young man with a very much more sympathetic eye. Lord P. was totally devoid of any poetical taste; but he really was a competent connoisseur in painting, and it pleased him to think that in all his encounters with this lad, the boy had kept this astonishing talent in the background.

Rachel sat down on the arm of her father's chair enveloping him in the warm sweetness of her glowing happiness.

“Well, Dad?” she said. “So you're not going to scold, after ail?”

He looked whimsically at the fingers she had placed in his. No! There was no sign of a wedding ring.

“\ouVe not gone and got manied by any chance?”' he asked.

She shook her head. “Tin not thinking of marrying for years and years. Ned would like to. But he never teases me about it. Do you, Ned?”

“Wiser not—to tease 'em about anything; eh, lad?” chuckled her father, glancing slyly at the young man. “You understand how to keep—you mustn't be cross at an old man's grossness —from getting—into trouble, as the servants say?”

Rachel nodded mischievously, and then smiled gravely and quietly straight into his eyes.

“And what lie do you tell to our worthy Miss Crow, Rachel? I presume you still ostensibly live with her?”