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“Listen, Angela Beere! Until a few months ago, though I didn't believe in God or in Immortality, I believed in Christ. I believed in Him as the tortured Enemy of God, as the friend of all the oppressed in the world! And I still believe in Him—but not in the same way—do you understand? No! I suppose you don't!— not in the same way, but far more than before!”

He stopped and stared at her; and there was a wild light in his little, greenish-coloured, animal eyes that made the calm young lady say to herself: “I must talk to Dr. Fell about him. I believe he's had some terrible mental shock.”

“Do you think, Angela Beere,” he went on, while the muscles of his chin worked frantically, and without knowing what he did he tugged so hard at the blue tie that he made the dog rear up like a rearing horse, “do you think a person could give up the sweetest happiness in his life—not just one great thing, but the thing, the only thing, if he weren't drawn on by some Reality?” “You poor darling!” thought Angela to herself. “Don't you know that people have been driven on by the Unreal—by lies, and illusions, and fables, and pure madness—to the point of killing the only thing they've ever loved!”

“I can see you think I've gone dotty, my dear,” he added with an indulgent smile, laying his bare hand on her gloved ones as they lay clasped in her lap. "And I've no doubt you and your friends think I've been a devil incarnate to leave Nell. Well, never mind that! What I'd like to know, if you wouldn't mind telling me—for I know what a friend you are of Percy's and

that------"

His voice broke when he marked the flood of colour that rushed to Angela's pale cheeks. Never had Sam beheld such a scarlet blush. It literally flooded her under her black hat. It flowed down her white neck. Her very ears seemed to yield themselves to it. Up went both her gloved hands to her face and the fact that she had to make this gesture increased her shyness. She looked to Sam as if she might be going to rise from the bench and run away.

“I didn't mean------” stammered Sam,

The girl struggled with herself and dropped her hands, staring at him with round blue eyes, while her underlip quivered. Slowly her colour receded, and her face became paler even than its wont.

“You seem to know all about us—about our friendship-Mr. Dekk^c, or you wouldn't ask me. So ... so I may as well . . . tell you. All Glastonbury will know in a day or two. * . . Yes, I've heard from her. I haven't seen her . . . but I've heard from her. She's gone to Russia!”

Sam was flabbergasted. He knew so little of the great world outside Glastonbury that there sounded to him a shock of startling finality in this. It was a second before he realised the import of this news in his own life. Zoyland was alone again then!

He looked at the girl by his side. Angela was searching in the same little handbag from which had come the handkerchief that now bound his wrist. She brought out a letter in an envelope now, and snapping the clasp of her bag with an impatient jerk, threw the letter upon Sam's knee.

“You can read what she says if you like!” she cried.

There was a French stamp upon the envelope and Sam commented upon this.

“Read it! Read it!” she murmured.

The letter was certainly not difficult to read. Written in Persephone's bold boy-like hand it was brief and to the point.

“Darling Angel,” it ran, “long before you get this I shall be in Paris, waiting to catch the express to Warsaw, en route for Russia. I couldn't stand it a day longer. I couldn't stand anything in our damned country. I must have a complete change or kill myself. I've gone back to politics, my dear, now that I've found love a fizzle. I believe Russia will suit me to a T. When I'm settled I may send for you to join me! if you like me still, that's to say! Tell Mr. Beere that the meals on French trains are adorable. Don't be cross now, for it had to be . . . your hopeless Percy.”

Sam handed the letter back to her while the words “He's alone at Whitelake again,” formed themselves in his mind.

“I'm sorry you've lost your friend, Miss Beere,” he said gravely. “But, as she says, perhaps one day you'll go too—to Russia.”

He uttered these last words as if they referred to some region so remote—as indeed they did—from his present world, that it was as if he'd said: “To the Isles of the Blest.”

The girl lowered her fair head, in its black hat, over her handbag and replaced the letter with slow deliberation. She seemed to be pondering deeply; for she remained motionless for a minute, her fingers on the envelope within the little silk-lined receptacle. Then she rose slowly to her feet and shook the front oi her skirt and passed her fingers quickly over the back of it.

“Well,” she said, holding out her hand with a smile, *i\ e sot to prepare my school lesson now, so I won't ask you ^hich way you're going. But if I were you, Mr. Dekker, I'd go and see your Penny at once about your wrist!"

Two hours later, in fact just as St. John's clock was chiming half-past four, Sam left his loft chamber, with the black dog comfortably asleep under his camp-bed, and sallied forth into the street. His face was washed and clean. His step was light. Angela's handkerchief was still round his wrist just as she had tied it. He came out that afternoon impatient to tell all the world what he had seen.

“I'll go to Nell and Father tonight,” he thought, “but not till after the evening service.”

He was so dazed with his new happiness that he gave no heed at all to the direction in which he was walking. He moved along like a somnambulist. Now and again he talked to himself in low mutterings. For normal persons to talk to themselves is either a sign of great happiness or of great unhappiness or a sign that they know themselves to be surrounded by absolute physical loneliness.

“Is it a Tench?” he kept muttering quite audibly. What he was always reverting to in his thoughts was the necessity he was under to tell everybody in Glastonbury that he had seen the Grail; and several times he stopped various errand boys and tradesmen's wives, whom he knew by sight, and began to tell them, or began to gather himself up to tell them, but by some queer psychological law they seemed inevitably to slip away from him before he had forced them to listen to him. He came by degrees to have that queer sensation that we have sometimes in dreams, that everything we touch eludes us and slides away. He even got the feeling that the pavements were soft under his feet and that the people he passed were like ghosts who moved without moving their legs.

At last he found himself walking in the immediate rear of ex-Mayor Wollop whose corporeality did seem lo strike him as more emphatic, and Sam, hurrying to overtake him, entered into conversation as they walked side by side. It seemed much easier to tell Mr. Wollop about his Vision than in these other cases. This was no doubt due to the fact that it was something seen; and not something felt, or thought, or imagined, or supposed, that Sam had to relate.

The great haberdasher took him in tow at once, even going so far as to rest two of his plump fingers upon the visionary's arm. Sam's heart so warmed to the man's kind tone that as he talked to him he felt for the second lime that day the sensation of tears mounting to his eyes.

Mi*. Wollop told him that it was his father's birthday and that in honour of this anniversary he was on his way to take tea with Mrs. Legge.

“You know the house,” he said, “it is called Camelot,” and he invited Sam to follow him to this auspicious domicile.

“She'll be overjoyed to see you, Sir,” he asseverated again and cgain. “Overjoyed she'll be! And there'll be nobody there but we two. 'Three's company', you know, Sir, 'and two's immorality,' as my old Dad used to say. She'll be ravaged with what you saw, Sir, . . . just as I am . . . ravaged.” ,

By degrees, under the redoubtable companionship of the friendly draper, Sam's wits began to grow a little less ensorcer-ised, and by the time they reached the aged procuress' house his pulses were beating to a rhythm that was nearly normal.

Behold him now, therefore, this girl-betrayer and child-deserter, this—to quote Zoyland's subsequent comments upon Sam's behaviour—“this double-dyed idiot and arch-prig,” seated at Mother Legge's mabogany table, under the staring eyes of the smug Recorders, drinking tea—with a touch of Bridgewater punch super-added—and eating buttered scones! He was ravenously hungry; for the black spaniel, refusing to touch the only raw meat he could procure for it, had swallowed with gusto every scrap of bread and treacle he had prepared for himself.

And as he ate and drank, and as the strong and delicately doctored tea warmed his blood, his tongue became unloosened as it had rarely been unloosened in his life before. The rapturous happiness that thrilled him was not, al least not all of it, directly due to his sight of the Holy Grail. It was undoubtedly partly due —but this itself was an indirect result of the vision—to some new adjustment of his soul and his body. For Ms soul was no longer an “external” soul! Yes! It no longer stood apart, by the side of his flesh, issuing categorical mandates; and indeed he felt now as if Mother Legge's very tea—Bridgewater punch and all —was nourishing both his soul and his body.

As his words flowed on—describing every detail of his great experience—he was surprised to find himself using words and phrases that he had made use of on that occasion on the top of the Tor, when he had defended the Incarnation against the Manichaean doctrines of Mr. Evans. He could even feel under his fingers the grass roots that he had plucked up that morning, nearly a year ago, in that sudden outburst of inspiration. His conception of the thing was very different now—for his Personal Christ had vanished—but with that curious pride in consistency that even “holy men” feel, he began glossing over this difference; as if a gardener, when a viola cornutus came up, where he had planted pansies, were to insist, “It is the same”; and use Ms ancient rigmarole on the beauty of pansies for this totally new growth!

But there may have entered into his eloquence at this point some slight stammering and hesitation which gave the aged procuress her cue.

“What worrits a simple old bitch like me,” protested Mother Legge, “is how an atheist, like you say you are, Holy Sam, could see the Blood o5 the Blessed One, when there ain't, and never 'as been, no Blessed One to bleed!”

Mr. Wollop glanced cautiously round the big apartment and looked with some nervousness at the heavy black curtains.

“What a man do see,” he remarked sententiously, “be one thing. What a man do think he sees be another. But what a man do say he sees be a proper knock-out! The mistress 'ere 'ave seed me poor old Dad—rest his merry soul!—raised up and a-wisiting 'er for no good purpose in 'er beauty sleep. But that don't mean that the old gent really comes out from's grave; do it, Marm?”

He kept his eyes on those black curtains of the late Kitty Camel's reception-room, as if he greatly preferred that the eldei Mr. Wollop should remain quiescent where he had been laid in the Wells Road graveyard.

“Were it like my silver bowl when 5ee seed it, Holy Sam?” enquired the old lady, settling her portentous frame more comfortably in her tall straight-backed chair and raising her tea-cup to her lips.

Sam's little green eyes shone radiantly. “It wasn't like anything on earth,” he cried. “And the moment I saw it I knew what it was. Everything will be different from now on, with the Grail come back to Glastonbury! It was a pure accident that I was the one who saw it first; but I'm going all round town today, telling everybody about it; and I expect hundreds of people will see it. I expect even the visitors will see it.”

“Will that 'andsome young man in me shop what I 'as such trouble with; the one what reads Neetsky to 'arden 'is 'eart when he gets the gals into trouble, see the 'Oly Grail?”

It would be difficult to believe that Mr. Wollop was not being facetious, unless you were seated opposite him and saw the guileless stare in his round eyes. The old procuress was much less guileless. Indeed she was positively clairvoyant in the subtle penetration of her next question.

“Have the Vision what you've been privileged with, Holy Sam, made 'ee forget they torments what the Saviour did bear for we pore sinners?”

This question of the aged woman—and it may well be that in the course of her long life as the purveyor of the sweets of sin she had acquired a diabolical insight—did assuredly hit Sam between the j oints of his armour. But the cresting wave of excitement on which he rode was so great that he answered without a second's hesitation.

“If you, or our friend here,” he aaiu, “had gone through unspeakable pains for anyone you loved, and these pains had been turned into heavenly wine and heavenly bread, wouldn't you feel it ungrateful in that person not to take and eat, not to take and drink and be filled with gratitude to you?”

It was natural enough, when Sam left the hospitable domain of Mother Legge, that he should find himself inevitably drifting towards the Vicarage. But he restrained himself from entering: and, in place of that, went on a sudden impulse up the drive of the Abbey House. It can be imagined what a shuck it was to him when, having rung at the front door, he was informed b> Lil\ that Miss Drew was “not at home.”

“But—Lily, my good girl! Where is she, if she isn't at home? She's always at home on Sunday afternoons! She's been at home on Sunday afternoons, reading the Guardian before tea and looking at the Illustrated London News after tea, from davs before you and I were born! Come now, Lily, what is it? What's up? Is she sick? Is she lying down? I've got something to tell her—something very important—something that would interest you and Louie too!”

Pestered in this way by a gentleman she had familiarly known as “Mr. Sam” since the days when she wore even shorter frocks than were the present fashion, Lily broke down, and with tears in her eyes confessed the sorrowful truth; the truth namely that Miss Drew had decided in the interests of public virtue never to have him in her home again.

“She's been to see Mr. Dekker too,” Lily went on, after a glance over her shoulder to make certain that the drawing-room door was closed, “and Mr. Weatherwax says he heard her, through the study window, storming at your Dad, Mr. Sam, like she was St. Dunstan scolding Satan. Mr. Weatherwax says he heard her tell your Dad that she'd write to the Lord Bishop, in his Palace at Wells, and tell him that Glastonbury Vicarage were become an Asylum for Fallen Women.”