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“My name is Evans,” said the other, making a dignified inclination of his body towards John. Had he said “My name is Plantagenet,” or “My name is Hapsburg,” he could not have uttered those syllables with more self-conscious weight. “Owen Evans,” he added, with a little sigh; and it was as if he desired by this emphasis on Owen to indicate to his interlocutor that it would have been more proper on general grounds if his Christian name had been Caradoc or Roderick or Constantine or even Taliessin. “My home used to be in Wales,” he continued, “in South Wales. I was in fact born in Pembrokeshire where that Altar Stone comes from.”

“Are you living in Glastonbury now?” John enquired. As soon as he had asked this question he felt he had said something gross, indecent, ill-advised; something lacking in all delicate intuition.

“Staying there ... for the present,” Owen Evans answered, “and what's more,” he continued, rising from his seat, “if we want to get there before everyone's in bed we must look sharp.”

He seemed to have forgotten—as indeed John himself had almost done—the lameness of his protege, and he strode off hastily now, past the Hele Stone, back to the thorn tree, taking for granted that the other was just behind him. But John Crow was not just behind him. He had turned as soon as they were a few paces away from the stones and was now gazing at them with an ecstasy that was like a religious trance. It was an ecstasy that totally abolished Time. Not only was Mr. Owen Evans and his motor car obliterated, but everything, past and future, was obliterated! Mary alone remained. But Mary remained as an essence rather than a person. Mary remained as something that he always carried about with him in the inmost core of his being. She was a dye, a stain, a flavour, an atmosphere. Apart from Mary, Stone-henge and John were all that there was. The enormous body of colossal stones wavered, hovered, swayed and rocked before him; so wrought upon was he, so caught up was he. It rocked like the prow of a vast ship before him. He and It were alone in space. Its dark menacing bulk seemed to grow more and more dominating as he stared at it, but even while it threatened it reassured. And it did not only grow calmer and larger. The taciturn enormity of the uplifted horizontal stones seemed to impose themselves upon his mind with an implication more stupendous than the supporting perpendicular ones. These uplifted stones—these upheld nakednesses—that covered nothing less than the breast of the earth and upon which nothing less than the universal sky rested, seemed to have become, by their very uplifting, more formidable and more sacred than the ones that held them up. They were like cyclopean Sabine women upheld by gigantic ravishers. Both those that upheld and those that were upheld loomed portentous in their passivity, but the passivity of the latter, while more pronounced, was much more imposing. What the instinctive heart of John Crow recognized in this great Body of Stones—both in those bearing-up and in those borne-up—was that they themselves, just as they were, had become, by the mute creative action of four thousand years, authentic Divine Beings. They were so old and great, these Stones, that they assumed godhead by their inherent natural right, gathered godhead up, as a lightning conductor gathers up electricity, and refused to delegate it to any mediator, to any interpreter, to any priest! And what enhanced the primeval grandeur of what John Crow gazed at was the condition of the elements at that hour. Had there been no remnants of twilight left, the darkness and Stonehenge would have completely interpenetrated. Had the stars been bright, their eternal remoteness would have derogated from the mystic enormity of this terrestrial portent. The stars were, however, so blurred and so indistinct, and. atmospherically speaking, so far away, that Stonehenge had no rival. John longed to get some impression of this vast Erection from some subhuman observer, unperverted by historic tradition. What would be the feelings of a sea gull, for example, voyaging thus far inland from Studland or from Lulworth in search of newly turned ploughlands, when it suddenly found itself confronted by this temple of the elements? Would it lodge for a moment on the highest impost of the tallest trilithon? Had any of the Wiltshire shepherds, who lived round about here, ever seen a sea gull actually perched upon the Hele Stone? What did the foxes make of Stonehenge as they came skulking over the grassy ridges from Normanton Down ? Did the sound of their barkings on wild November nights reach the ears of travellers crossing the Plain? Did a power emanating from these stones attract all the adders and grass snakes and blindworms between Amesbury and Warminster, on certain enchanted summer evenings?

Never would Stonehenge look more majestic, more mysterious, than it looked tonight! The wind had almost dropped and yet there was enough left to stir the dead stems of last year's grasses and to make a faint, very faint susurration as it moved among the Stones. The very indistinctness of the dying daylight served also to enhance the impressiveness of the place. Had the night been pitch dark nothing could have been distinguished. On the other hand, had the twilight not advanced so far, the expanding sweep of the surrounding downs would have carried the eye away from the stones themselves and reduced their shadowy immensity. No artificial arrangement of matter, however terrific and unhewn, can compare with the actual hollows and excrescences of the planet itself; but the primeval erection at which John Crow stared now, like the ghost of a neolithic slave at the gods of his masters, was increased in weight and mass by reason of the fact that nothing surrounded \t except a vague, neutral, Cimmerian greyness.

“Stonehenge, you greal God!” cried John Crow, “I beg you to make M,ary a happy girl and I beg you to let me live with her in Norfolk!”

He tore himself away after this and hurried, as fast as he could, towards the thorn tree. The voice of Owen Evans increased his speed as he staggered up the slope. “Mr. Crow! Mr. Crow! Mr. Crow!” came that voice from beyond the tree in a high querulous accent. His blister began to hurt him again. He began again to feel famished and faint. Once more he paused and looked around. The effect at this distance had undergone a change. The stones seemed actually to have melted into one another! It was no longer at a series of stones he was looking, but at one stone. Perhaps indeed just then he was seeing Stonehenge as it would have appeared, not to a wild bird or a fox, but to a flock of sheep travelling from their pastures to the shearing-place.

“Mr. Crow! Mr. Crow!” came the voice of the Welshman; and John felt it incumbent upon him now really to turn his back upon Stonehenge. When he reached .the car John Crow was surprised at the urbanity and good-temper of Mr. Owen Evans. He had expected that the man from South Wales, even if he didn't desert him, would reproach him vehemently. Nothing of the sort occurred. John got in and took his seat by the motorist's side, avoiding with some difficulty, for his legs were long and his foot extremely sore, the mechanism that worked the machine.

“Are you going to stay long in Glastonbury?” enquired Mr. Evans. John was perfectly frank with him in answer to this direct question. Indeed, in the entranced and relaxed condition of his nerves, he was more frank than he need have been. He became, in fact, very voluble. He told him everything; only keeping back the existence of Mary and the existence of Tom Barter. By degrees, as he conversed with the man, while their car reached and passed the lighted streets of Warminster, he became conscious that Wtr. Evans' questions and answers were composed of two levels of intensity, one below another. The upper, more superficial level, was .pedantic and a little patronising, but the lower level struck John's mind as not merely humble and sad but tragically humble and sad. One or two of his remarks were indeed as exciting to John's curiosity as they were stimulating to his sympathy. And another thing he noticed about the conversation of this man in the large bowler hat and the tight black overcoat was that it was always when the conversation returned to Glastonbury that this secondary tone came into his voice.

“We'll get a late supper at Frome,” Mr. Evans said at one point; and the idea of this heavenly refreshment spoken of lightly as a “late supper” so preoccupied John's thoughts that by degrees he contented himself with a drowsy attempt to learn the names of the villages through which they passed and dropped all other conversation.

They skirted the wall of Long Leat Park. They passed Upper Whitbourne; they passed Corsley Heath; they passed Lane End and Gradon Farm; and while still the memory of his mother was lulling him with a security beyond description, they entered the main street of Frome. Mr. Evans seemed to know the place well, and having left their car in the yard of one of the smaller inns, the two men walked slowly down the street. Most of the ordinary teashops were shut, but they found at last a little refreshment-place of a more modest kind, where they were given a cordial welcome and a substantial though simple supper in a small private room. During this meal this strangely assorted pair had the first opportunity they had yet enjoyed to study each other's physiognomy under illuminated and relaxed conditions. John found that Mr. Evans had already heard rumours of the strange sequence of events by which the lay-preacher Geard had inherited William Crow's money. Evans himself, he explained, had made the acquaintance of the Geards through the fact of Mrs. Geard being a member of a very ancient South Welsh family called Rhys. The motorist uttered the name Rhys with the most reverential respect. Not that Mrs. Geard's immediate relatives, he made clear to John, were anything but quite simple people, but all the Rhys family were, as an ordinary person would put it, of the blood royal of Wales.

It did not take any great diplomacy on the part of John Crow to lead the conversation up to a point where he learned the not-unexpected fact that the maternal ancestors of Mr. Evans himself belonged to this same ancient House of Rhys. After a little further dalliance round and about the subject of the Geards, John found himself possessed of the further information that Mr. Owen Evans was an admirer of one of Mrs. Geard's daughters, a girl in whom “the very spirit of the old Cymric race” had found a notable habitation. It was in his “first manner,” the pontifical one, that Owen Evans described this young lady. The foxy John had begun to wonder indeed whether his whole discovery of these two personalities in his patron were not a crazy fancy of his own, when a chance allusion to the Abbey Ruins brought back in a minute that diffident, hesitant, almost coivering tone. It was a queer thing and a thing that John never afterward forgot, as he saw a look of positively tragic suffering cross those strongly marked lineaments, that he himself became extremely uncomfortable when this second tone of his friend's utterances thus predominated. It was exactly as if some bombastic masquerader in theatrical armour had suddenly unclasped his sham gorget and revealed a hairshirt stained with authentic blood. He got the impression, the longer this confidential talk over this felicitous “late supper” lasted, that it was to very few persons, and probably least of all to the maiden with the “very spirit of the old Cymric race,” that this singular descendant of the House of Rhys revealed his real nature.

Once more sitting by Mr. Evans in the little motor car and moving swiftly through the darkness, John's attention was distracted now by a certain vivid consciousness of being in a part of England completely new to him and heavy with unique qualities. After walking all day over the chalk uplands of Wiltshire this long, enchanted drive into the western valleys was like plunging into an ever-deepening wave of rich, sepia-brown, century-old leaf-mould. From spinneys and copses and ancestral parks, as they drove between dim, moss-scented banks, a chilly sweetness that seemed wet with the life sap of millions of primrose buds came flowing over him. . . .

As both the men grew more and more dominated, by the motions and stirrings, the silent breathings and floating murmurs, of a spring night in Somersetshire, they seemed to grow steadily more sympathetic to each other.

“Do you believe, Mr. Evans, as so many people do,” said John suddenly, “in always struggling to find a meaning to life?” Very slowly and very carefully did (he Welshman reply to this.

“It's not . . . it never has been ... in my ... in my nature,” he murmured, “to ... to take life ... in that . . . way . . . at all. I find meanings everywhere. My . . /' he hesitated for a long time here, ”difficulties,“ he went on, ”are entirely personal."

John was delighted with this reply. “My difficulties,” he said, “are personal too. I simply cannot understand what people mean when they talk of life having a purpose. Life to me is simply the experience of living things; and most tilings I meet seem to me to be living things.”

In the darkness John felt the car crossing a little bridge. “Nunney Brook,” he heard Mr. Evans murmur. Soon they were moving along the southern wall of Asham Wood, and then came East Cranmore and West Cranmore and then a place called Doulting.

“Look out for Shepton Mallet next,” Mr. Evans said. “I'm afraid all the pubs will be shut, or we'd stop for a drink there to nerve us up for the last lap of our journey.” His words were justified. It was plain that the inn-bars in Shepton Mallet were all fast closed.

“We must put on speed now,” said Mr. Evans, “or everybody will be fast asleep. They go to bed early in Glastonbury.”

John was soon conscious, as they left the last houses of this little Somersetshire town, solidly built houses under the gas-lamps at the street corners with old carved lintels and worn buttresses, that the countryside was again changing its character. A faint reedy, muddy, watery atmosphere visited his East Anglian nostrils. For a mile or two he was puzzled by these damp waftures carried upon the cold night air, so different from that leaf-mould sweetness, that smell of ancient seignorial parklands, through which they had recently passed. He experienced a pang of sadness which it was easy enough to explain. It was a thousand old impressions of Isle-of-Ely dykes, called up, out of deep-buried race memories, by the ditches, or “rhynes,” as they call them, of the Isle-of-Glastonbury.

' “I am getting near Mary!” he thought. “She's lying in bed looking at those Ruins.” And then he thought, “Evans is going to get me a bed somewhere. He knows I've got no rnpney. Ill see her tomorrow by hook or by crook and then everything will work itself out.”