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Yes, she had been astonished herself, as day followed day and it became clearer and clearer that Sam's whole nature was set upon this inexorable quest of his, at the apathy with which she accepted it. She came near to accusing herself of having allowed her heart to die within her, so numb, so paralysed, so atrophied did her emotions—after that first night of wild sobbing—seem to have grown. Even a strangely detached amusement had in these last weeks been rising up in her heart; an amusement that was rather schoolgirlish mischief than a maternal humor, at the thought of all those great hulking, blundering men following so crudely the prickings of their desire.

Under the pressure of this mood she had even begun to feel friendly again to Zoyland. Persephone was a totally different matter; and she kept telling herself several malevolent stories of imaginary encounters with Persephone, during which she brought down that young woman very wholesomely to her knees! But to her yellow-bearded Will she did begin to feel indulgent again; especially when she noted the contorted tricks and arbitrary devices which religion compels its votaries to undergo, if they are to love and to refrain from loving, as the two Dek-kers were now trying to do at one and the same time!

Yes, she was wondering to herself now at this very minute, as she glanced up at the marble clock which had stopped at twenty minutes past two—perhaps the very hour in the night at which Sam's mother had died!—what her Sam, and her Sam's father, in their preposterous attempts not to quarrel savagely over her, would feel if they could read this queer humorous turn that her thoughts had taken of late! What had begun to strike her as specially quaint was the way they seemed to assume that whatever treaty or truce or peace they patched up between themselves about her, she would accede to without any question!

She was like a sack of exciting oats placed in a manger between two champing steeds. Well! she wasn't so sure that she would submit to being a sack of oats! As this thought came upon her once again this morning, the corners of her mouth quivered in the second silent smile in which she had indulged since Sam told her to “wait a second”; and her eyes moved from the marble clock to the green plush sofa.

“What's come over me?” she said to herself. *Am I growing cynical? Am I getting like Percy?"

A slight puckering of her forehead followed this mental question; and as if in proof that her new detachment was a girlish, rather than a maternal emotion, she found herself hoping that her little son—it was about eleven o'clock in the morning-— would sleep sound till jafoon, and allow her to leave him alone for another hour, in his cradle by the big bed.

Mercy! but she did miss her own house! That at least was certain. It teased her to think of Percy messing about with her cups and saucers, and forgetting to put the bread in the cake-box and the rolls in the biscuit-tin.

“I'm sure she doesn't wash out the> sugar-basin,” she thought to herself, “and I know she doesn't keep the cheese on a shelf by itself!”

And as she stared at the green plush sofa the incorrigible immorality of her woman's mind sighed just a little for the free, careless swing of the Zoyland attitude to life, compared with the impassioned pieties of this monastic establishment.

“What I really am now,” she thought, “in place of being the mistress of a wicked baron, is the petted bone of contention in a hermitage!”

The door which had been left ajar was now kicked open and Sam came in with a coal-scuttle full of coal in one hand and a pile of large bits of wood in the other.

“I've told Penny to make you up a good fire,” he said, “next time you want to sit in here; but why you don't stay in the museum, where Father likes to see you sewing in that chair while he's writing his sermon, I can't think!”

He spoke irritably; but he knew in his heart it was because of his own bad humour, when he found her ensconced with his father, that she had invaded this closed-up shrine of the past.

“Sit down, Sam, my dear,” she said, when he had made the fire blaze, “I want to talk to you.”

He obeyed her. But it was not at her side, but upon the plush sofa that he took his seat.

“You know, my dearest one,” she said gravely, folding up her son's night-shirt upon her lap, “that if you can stand the way we're living, / can't! Now stop, my dear; stop! Don't interrupt, till you've heard what I'm going to say! I'm not going to beg you to do anything you don't want to; so you needn't glower at me as if I were a wicked girl trying to tempt you. It's only this, dear. I was talking to Dave last week and he says that Percy refuses to take a penny of his money. He says that he can't make her take it; but nothing will induce him to keep it himself. He says if I won't take it he'll1 just throw it into the town council fund. Fve been thinking about this, Sam dear; and I've decided that I will take it. Even if Philip chucks Wilf out because of Percy they'll be all right. Lord P. won't let them come to grief. He's always been offering to help Will; and with all this money he's getting for this great sale—No! They'll be all right. I'm not going to bother my head about tltem”

Sam turned and stretched out his heavy hands over his knees, extending all his fingers. It was as if his hands were yawning with an amorous relaxation unpermitted to the rest of his frame. His shirt-sleeves disappeared under the frayed edges of his coat-cuffs and his wrists showed hairy and red.

“But Nell? What then?” he murmured. “You're not going to leave Father and me, are you?”

She rubbed one of her ankles automatically wTith the warm, shapeless, schoolgirl palms of her soft hands. Then she turned her head and surveyed Sam upon the sofa. She surveyed, too, an ironwork stand behind Sam's head, containing several hart's tongue ferns, kept alive for years by Penny, for whom this room represented an everlasting Seventh Day of drowsy and futile piety. A big wastepaper basket with ornamented handles stood at the end of the sofa, into which nothing had been put—except Penny's broom—for twenty-five years. By the side of this basket, resting upon the faded green carpet, lay a large, oblong pebblestone from Chesil Beach, upon which the short-lived Mrs. Dekker had painted, during her confinement, a brightly coloured picture of her native Swiss lake.

From all these things Nell's nostrils inhaled the same curious smell, the smell of inanimate objects left in status quo for a quarter of a century. Why, if she were in such an old ballad mood of patient docility, had she ever started this disturbing conversation, worrying Sam about Dave's money, and protesting that she, for her part, could not go on as they were? The truth was she happened to be under the moon that particular day, and if another woman had asked her why she was behaving like this, she would have replied that she was “nervous.”

As a matter of fact—though what did the simpleton on the sofa, with the hairy red wrists, know about such things?—the blind creative energy within her was in the vein for troubling, for disturbing, for agitating, for darkening all the unruffled waters it could approach.

“You don't suppose, Sam, do you, that any girl with any spirit could go on like this?”

Sam pulled in his outstretched arms and thrust them deep into his pockets.

“I don't see why not, Nell. I don't see why not!”

Her eyes, that had dark shadows beneath them, narrowed suddenly into little gentian-blue shuttles of darting anger.

“No, I suppose you dorit see!” she cried. “I suppose you and your father could go on with your precious aquarium and your precious Holy Grail, till the crack of doom, while a girl ate her heart out in a place like this!”

“Nell—little Nell!” he murmured reproachfully. The gentleness of his tone disconcerted her.

At that moment what her nerves would have liked above everything else was for him to have risen to his feet and roundly scolded her; told her that she was his, that she was his chattel, his possession, his slave, his whore, that her child was his child, her body his body, her will his will.

“Oh, I don't know!” she breathed wearily, expanding her breasts and clasping her hands behind the back of her head. “I don't know what I'm saying, Sam. But I know everything is all wrong.”

But his forehead was corrugated now in a heavy frown and his freckled chin was wrinkling itself downwards into his neck.

“Your Holy Grail?” he thought to himself, “0 Christ, my Christ, if you would but once, just once, for one minute, give me a sign, only the smallest faintest sign that you are really there, behind it all; then I could go on, without aching to have her, to hold her, night and day!”

Because of his heavy unimaginative nature, because of his preference for minnows and stickle-backs and loach over mythical abstractions, Sam had never given much thought to the legend of the Grail. The Christ whose deadly, cruel imperative had come between him and his love had been as much of a Person as Nell herself. Was He a Person still?

How different was Sam's Christ from Mr. Geard's! Mr. Geard's Christ was a Power to be exploited. In his weird gnostic dialogues with his Master, the Mayor of Glastonbury addressed Him like a friend, almost like an equal. He was the Mayor's great magician, his super-Merlin, by whose strength and support he became strong. Never once had it crossed the threshold of Mr. Geard's consciousness that it was his duty to live a life of self-sacrifice.

“I live as I like to live” he would have retorted to any ascetic protest, “and my Master lives as He likes to live. His Blood is the Water of Life!”

“Christ in His Grail,” repeated Sam to himself, “and Father in his aquarium and Nell in my mother's room!”

She had turned her face away from him now. She was bending over the fire, prodding it pensively with the poker. As he watched her doing this, the feeling came over him that just behind the physical drama that was going on at the minute, another, a corresponding drama, was going on in the Invisible.

“Aquarium-Grail . . . Grail-aquarium,” he muttered; and his ichthyological mind visioned a Fish that was a real fish and yet something more than a fish shedding a mystic light out of an enchanted vessel.

Sam lowered his eyes and let his head sink deeper and deeper into his chest, while his hands, that were in his pockets, clenched their fists. He thought of a particular spot on the banks of the Brue where he had often fished with his father as a boy. It was at a turn of the river and it was several fields westward from the wooden bridge where Young Tewsy had caught his recent surprising catch, to the delight of Mother Legge.

“Aquarium-Grail,” he repeated, in the dark trans-lunar cave oi his consciousness, “Grail-aquarium”; and it came over him, just as if his tormented and tormenting God had whispered it into his ear, that the sacrifice which was laid upon him now was to leave the Vicarage himself.

“If she can't stand Father and me together,” he thought, “and I expect we have made it too much for her, it's not she that must go . . . that's unthinkable . . . how would she get on alone . . . alone with out child? . . . it's myself that must go • , . it's you, Sam, that must go.”

He had reached a point in his asceticism when he often felt his imperative soul to be standing over against his reluctant body like an austere slave-driver. Indeed he had come to think of his soul as in some way external to his body. There was not much pleasure about this; but there was just the faintest flicker of a strange satisfaction in it. At any rate it gave him a sense that his soul was totally independent of his body and was the proud master of his body. He pulled up his legs with a jerk and removed his hands from his pockets.

“It's you, Sam, that must go!” he repeated grimly in his heart

Thus what had begun as a pure wanton troubling of the waters, because Nell felt nervous, had become another tragic turning point in the girl's life. Something in her was vaguely aware of this as Sam rose up from the green sofa.

Impulsively, with a movement that was entirely self-forgetful, she leapt to her feet and ran towards him; while he—just because he had given his body its implacable orders and because this was perhaps a moment that would never come back again— pressed her so tightly to his heart that she could hardly breathe. She had just time to think: “This is how I'd like to die . . . crushed to death by Sam,” when the door opened and Mat Dek-ker came in. They were so tightly clasped that they were like two trees that have grown together, each with its bark eroded by the pressure of the other, each with the same ivy or vine imprisoning its limbs, and when they broke apart and turned to the man at the door it was as if each of them, as they swung into independent life, carried away something of the living texture of the other.

“I thought . , . I understood . . .” began Mat Dekker, and he turned with a portentous and passionate solemnity to the door by which he had entered, opening it, looking out into the passage, closing it again, and finally locking it. He seemed prepared to behave towards this door, the drawing-room door of Glastonbury Vicarage, as Diogenes behaved to his tub, venting upon its unfeeling wood emotions excited by the aberrations of human passion.

The truth was that Mat Dekker was seized at that moment with a murderous fury against his son; and it was only by concentrating on the door—wai k locked? was Penny listening behind it?—that his better nature was able to steal a moment's breathing space wherein to gather up its self-control.

The door carried above its handle a decorative panel of prettilv flowered porcelain, to protect it from sticky fingers, and over this cool china surface Mat Dekker now passed his thumb as if to see whether those hundred-years-old roses would come off. All this took a very brief time, but it was long enough to restore to him a modicum of his self-control; and turning now towards the two of them, he addressed Nell with a slightly forward-moving inclination of his massive grey head.

“I've been hearing the child crying for quite a few minutes,” he remarked. “I came to tell you.”

His own words gave him an opportunity to return once more to the redoubtable door, and he tugged at the handle to open it—for he assumed she would rush upstairs at once—forgetting that in his agitation he had turned its key. He unlocked it and held the door open.