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The voice of an extremely impatient infant was now quite audible from upstairs. But Nell at first drew back.

“It isn't good for him to be taken up the first minute he cries,” she said.

She knew by instinct that Mat Dekker was anxious to< avenge himself upon his son for what he had just seen. But the glare of concentrated command that shot out at her from under those bushy eyebrows, as she lingered, was too formidable to be disobeyed. She flung a hurried, tender, guilty, accomplice's look at her ambiguous lover; but Sam seemed to be lost in some deep thought of his own, for he was staring fixedly at the marble clock with its hands pointing to twenty minutes after two.

“You'll make me spoil him,” she cried. “You are all on his side, however naughty he is.”

With these words and giving Mat Dekker a smile that had something supplicating about it, she passed by him and went out. Evidently a sense that she had been treated more like a little girl than a grown woman irritated her as soon as she was in the hall, for she called back, in quite a defiant voice, “Will was just the same! You'd all spoil him if you could!” But she ran upstairs now, and with the closing of the door behind her the child's angry cries were shut out.

Mat Dekker walked over to where his son stood.

“This sort of thing must stop, my boy.”

It was with a palpable effort to restrain his feelings that he added the two syllables, “my boy.”

“As I've been telling you all the time,” he went on, “there are only two things a gentleman”—he emphasised the word—“could do in your situation. He could either make her get a divorce from her husband and marry her, or ... or ... or he could------”

Sam interrupted his father, looking him straight in the eyes: “Or he could clear off himself? Is that what you were going to say?”

The blood had rushed to Sam's head as he uttered this retort; but in a second he had recovered his equanimity.

“Come along, Father,” he said quietly, “let's go into the museum. It seems unnatural to talk here, I can't talk here.”

It was Sam's turn now to open the door with the rose-painted china panel. It was Sam's turn, too, by the very power of his calmness, to compel the grizzled, ruddy-faced man with the quivering upper lip to go out into the hall. Down the passage they walked together and together they entered the museum. Here in the presence of the familiar aquarium, the familiar iron candlesticks, the familiar daguerreotypes, the father and son faced each other. Neither of them sat down, and there was indeed little attraction about the few fading coals in the grate—Mat Dekker had evidently been too absorbed in his thoughts to keep his fire up—to lure them to sit down, but the father on the right of the fireplace with his hand on the mantelpiece, and the son on the left with his hand on the mantelpiece, confronted each other like two duellists.

“Grail-aquarium . . • aquarium-Grail,” ran like a refrain through Sam's head; and he began suddenly to feel again that queer sensation he had felt in the drawing-room, a sensation like that of the presence of a double world, every motion and gesture in the first being a symbol of something that was taking place in the second. The sensation was accompanied by an absolute conviction of the boundless importance of every thought that a human being had.

It was also accompanied—strange though c may seem at this tragic moment—by a faint thrill of mysterious happiness—the first authentic leap of spontaneous happiness in him that poor Sam had known for many a month.

He glanced round at the aquarium, as his father began speaking, and Nell's sarcastic cry “your precious aquarium” transmuted itself into a spasm of sweetness that was like a prolongation of what he had felt just now when he pressed her to his heart.

“It's against all I've believed—this damned business of divorce,” burst out Mat Dekker fiercely, “but the church has always retained the right to deal with special conditions in special ways; and with that brute, over there, behaving as he is------”

The man's formidable upper lip began quivering again, and Sam noticed that there was a blood-stain upon the white clerical tie that in the old-fashioned evangelical manner this eccentric high-churchman wore round his muscular neck.

“His hand must have shaken when he was shaving,” thought Sam. “Jesus give me strength not to get angry!”

“With that brute like he is, and doing it openly—turning her out in fact—I can make short work of him. I shall go and see John Beere this afternoon. It's not a thing”—he made an automatic humorous grimace of disgust—“that I like doing. All lawyers are rogues. But it's what I'm going to do; and I'm going to do it willy-nilly as far as she's concerned. She shan't be worried with it till I've got the thing well under way!”

He looked so pathetically proud of himself in this display of worldly sagacity before his simple and blundering son, that Sam felt a stab of remorse at having broken up their life and brought all these things down on that grey head.

“I wouldn't do that, Father,” he cried. “I wouldn't tell Beere, or anyone else, a word about it unless she asks you to. How do you know that she wants to divorce him? Women are funny in these things. Oh, I know, I know she wouldn't like it for you to do that, without telling her! Besides, Father, I don't believe that Mr. Beere would even discuss it unless she came herself. They always have to go themselves. That's how it is in the newspapers. They have to go to court. That's why they hate it. They can't bear to go to court”

Mr. Dekker began striding up and down the floor of the museum. He seemed irritated by his clerical dress at this crisis in his life. What he would really have liked to do was to go out to Whitelake and challenge Zoyland to a bout of fisticuffs, then have it out with his son—he could not quite have explained what form this scene would have taken—and then------ And it was this “and then” that was the whole crux of the situation.

In his passion and in his professional and religious restrictions, this sturdy son of the Quantocks looked like a caged wild animal as he paced back and forth. His feelings were expressed in the way he hitched up his long broadcloth coat-tails so as to thrust his hands into his pockets and the way he let these tails hang, one over each wrist, as he walked up and down.

To ruffle his priest's attire was a small gesture; but it belonged to the same category of gestures as his ordering the girl to go up to her baby and his telling Sam about his resolve to visit Lawyer Beere.

“The best thing you can do then,” he brought out now, standing still by the edge of the aquarium, into which even as he spoke he could not help giving a sidelong glance, “the best thing you can do is to take her to see Beere yourself. You'll have to be— what's their word—co-respondent, of course; that is, if he brings a counter-suit on his side, as I have no doubt the beggar will.”

Once more Sam was aware of a pathetic note of self-complacency in his father's tone.

“The old man,” he thought to himself, “is proud of his worldly knowledge. He thinks Fve never heard the words co-respondent or counter-suit Christ, don't let me get angry with him!”

The moment had come when he had to tell his father what was in his mind; but it was a fearful wrench to utter the words and it would be a worse thing for his father when he heard them. Aye! he had come to it. He never thought he would; but he had. He had to tell his father that he was going to leave him. Sam knew much better than did this grey-haired man, hunching up his coat-tails, what it would mean to both of them, this separation. '*0f course,“ he thought, ”I shall be still in Glastonbury. But it'll be the end of our real life together. It'll be the end of our long evenings in this room. It'll be the end of our mornings in the potato garden/'

“You know more about the law than I do. Father,'” he remarked. But he said it only to gain time. “And I certainly should not draw back from helping her in any way I could.”

His father's hands came out of his pockets now and one of them was thrust into the aquarium! He had caught sight of something there that Sam, at any rate, had never seen in the aquarium; no! not since as a small child, he had watched his father changing its water and its weeds.

There were now three kinds of weeds in the aquarium, two of them river-weeds, and one of them a pond-weed; and it was in an entanglement of this pond-weed that Mat Dekker had found what was such a shock to him and what, at any other time, would have been an event of the first importance in Glastonbury Vicarage. He had found a dead fish.

“Dead! One of the Meare-Rhyne ones!” muttered Mat Dekker now, holding out the tiny little corpse for Sam to see.

It looked very small indeed in the priest's great brown palm— very small and silvery—like an “animula, vagula, blandula”' in the hand of God.

“That's what it is—one of the Meare-Rhyne ones!” echoed Sam.

“We didn't change the water yesterday,” said his father,

“Nor the green weed last week,” added Sam.

“And we left that duck-week,” said his father, “when we knew it ought to come out.”

“And we never got that fresh gravel from Keinton Mande-ville,” sighed Sam.

“Or a trowel-full* of that sand we saw at Athelney,” groaned his father.

“It's our own fault that this minnow's dead,” said Sam.

“We've killed it,” echoed the Vicar of Glastonbury, “as surely and certainly as if we'd fished it out and thrown it into the fire.”

“Put it here,” said Sam, hurriedly bringing from the chimney piece a little copper plaque with the head of St. Dunstan engraved on it.

Mr. Dekker tipped the little fish from his hand into the centre of this plate where it lay across the sullen brow of the despotic ecclesiastic.

“Let's see what happens to it now” murmured Sam, tossing some* drops of water out of a tumbler and covering up the fish.

“What'll happen to all of us, my boy!” sighed his father, sinking into one of the creaking wicker chairs, while Sam took possession of the other.

' They surveyed each other in silence; and a moment passed during which they knew—those two heavily breathing, staring men—that it would take more than the maddening breasts of that sweet creature upstairs, suckling her child, really to separate them, the one from the other.

But Sam pulled himself together. It was not for the sake of peace with his father that he had to go. It was not even because Nell had said:—“If you can stand the way we're living, / can't!” It was because, without question, or doubt, or any compromise, his “external soul” had commanded him to leave this house.

He drew in his breath several times before he spolce, inhaling with it that old familiar smell of his father's workroom that seemed as much composed of some wholesome emanation from the priest's massive animal-frame as from the fumes of his pipe and the musty odour of the leather bindings of Dr. Simeon's Sermons.

“I've got something to tell you, Father,” he said.

“Eh, boy—speak up; out with it!”

The tone was identical with the tone which Sam had heard from him when, on leaving Cambridge, he had announced that he could not be ordained; but somehow, hearing it now, it put him'back into the Eton collar of his first term of the Sher-borne Prep.

“Don't interrupt me then, Father, please, and I'll tell you.”

Oh, these deadly pauses, these creakings of chairs, these swal-lowings of saliva, when the outer co>at of the human stomach seems to be inflating and deflating itself like the belly of a frog!

“I've decided to leave this house. Father, and take lodgings for myself in the—** His words' came pattering out . . . tit-tot . . . tit-tat . * . tit-tut . . . like the tread of the Greylands Cadet Corps wThen commanded to advance at quick time—*'in the town, somewhere, and earn my own living. I want to earn it as a working-man, and I'm pretty sure I can get a job that wouldn't take me much time to learn at this new municipal factory. I understand that—no! don't interrupt me, Father!—that there are several places unfilled there, because they can't find enough people to take such poor wages. This won't mean my becoming a Socialist, or anything like that! They're ready to take anyone; and they know I'm not interested in politics. I'm going round to the Tribunal this afternoon to talk to this new lawyer they've got, this nephew of old Merry's, and when I've got my job, can 'ee guess where I'm going to live, Father? No! Stop! Let me tell you! I'm going to live in the attic of that old warehouse, with the Gothic door, that we've so often noticed when we've started on our walks towards Meare. You spoke of it yourself . . . don't you remember? . . . that day we took our lunch and got as faT as Bawdrip?”

He stopped breathlessly. Well! it was done now! He had crossed his Rubicon. He had severed that animal-male link, stronger in some ways even than the umbilical cord itself, which had bound him so long, hirsute flesh against hirsute flesh, to his begetter. He didn't dare to look at his father now. He raised his head and stared at the aquarium. It was Nell's chance-word that had suddenly made his path so clear; just as it had been Crum-mie's chance-word, reported to him by Red Robinson, that had started the whole thing.

“Girls' words, tossed out without thought—they've changed my whole life,” he said to himself. "I said good-bye to her in Mother's room and now------*'

He jumped to his feet, lurched forward and clutching his father's forehead in both his hands, bent down over it and kissed it. “And now,” he added, in his deepest heart, “I've said goodbye to him in our room.”

After kissing his father's bent head—for Mat Dekker, as if under the blinding glare, of his enemy the sun, had lowered his face and closed his eyes—Sam walked to the door. As he put out his hand to its handle he seemed to see the whole of his life as nothing but doors—study doors, drawing-room doors, church doors, privy doors, kitchen doors, bedroom doors . . .

“Sam!” His father was* on his feet, straightening his shoulders, tightening his lips, fumbling blindly with his heavy gold watch-chain.

The priest's thoughts and feelings r.t that moment were incoherent to a point of physical distress. They were like a whirlpool, tossing up opposite things, drowned bodies, ravening sharks, shimmering mother-of-pearl, cowry shells, dogfish, from the bottom of the mind's deep sea.