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The thoughts of Mr. Evans, as they passed the hamlet of Pilton and crossed the Whitelake River by a small stone bridge, were so absorbing that he instinctively began driving very slowly. Like all thoughts that have tormented a person's mind for many years, these thoughts had bruised and beaten themselves against the mental walls of habit until they had ceased to be thoughts and had become palpable images. The images in Mr. Evans5 case were of a very peculiar nature. If they could have been revealed to any average human mind—a mind less vicious and depraved than John's—they would have presented themselves as something so monstrous as to be the creation of an insane person. This they certainly were not, unless all erotic aberrations are insane; and Mr. Evans, apart from these images, was, as John had discovered, a pedantically and even tediously guileless man. They were scenes of sadistic cruelty, these pictures that dwelt in the back chambers of Mr. Evans' mind; and the extraordinary thing about them was that, in spite of their iniquity, which was indeed abominable, they still produced in him—whenever the least glimpse of them took form again—an inebriation of erotic excitement that made his pulses beat, his blood dance, his senses swoon, his knees knock together. The taste of the least of these loathsome scenes was so overpowering to him that it reduced all the rest of life— eating, drinking, working, playing, walking, talking—to tedious occurrences, that had to be got through but that were wanting entirely in the electric quiver of real excitement. What Mr. Evans suffered from was a fever of remorse such as cannot very often have taken possession of human minds in the long course of history. To say that the unhappy man wished that he had never been born would be to put his case mildly. Like Othello he longed to bathe in “sleep-down gulfs of liquid fire.” No one would ever know—unless Mr. Evans confessed to a priest—how many of these abominations had actually been practised, how many of them described in forbidden books, or how many just simply invented by a perverted imagination. If the victim or victims of Mr. Evans' perversion, supposing they really existed and were not phantoms of his imagination, had suffered cruelly, Mr. Evans himself had suffered, for the last five or six years, a torment to which human history can, we must hope, offer few parallels.

His nature was so riddled and saturated with this appalling habit of mind that it became a mania with him—now that he had rejected all practice of it and all pleasure from all thoughts of it—to blame himself for innumerable forms of suffering in the world, of which he was entirely innocent He walked about as if the ground under his feet was red-hot iron, so fearful was he of hurting so much as the tiniest beetle or the smallest worm. He used deliberately to walk across heavy grass and heavy undergrowth so as to avoid the little half-made paths which always struck his imagination as things that had been hurt. Since a feeling of power, carried to a monstrous intensity, played such a role in his vice, it was natural enough that when, aghast at what he had become, he gave the whole thing up, he should labor under the delusion of being a much more powerful force in the world than he really was. Few modern persons, as intelligent as Owen Evans, believed as intensely as he did in the existence of a personal God. Perhaps there is something in the peculiar nature of this vice which especially lends itself to this belief.

Recovering himself from his secret thoughts, as they came nearer and nearer to the end of their journey, Mr. Evans murmured to his companion such words as “Havyatt” and “Edgar-ley.” He nodded his head, too, towards a great level expanse of low-lying country which extended southward, on their left, as they approached their destination. In connection with these dark fields he uttered the syllables “Kannard Moor” and “Butt Moor.” He further indicated that Baltonsborough and Keinton Mande-ville lay on the other side of these wide-stretching water-logged pastures, at which John, in his blunt East Anglian way, declared that in his country such places would have had names ending in “ham,” not in such finicking sounds as “ville.” He told Mr. Evans that Saxmundham was a much more characteristic English name than Keinton Mandeville!

As they approached the outskirts of the place, John became aware of the dim pyramidal form of Glastonbury Tor, towering above the walls and roofs of the town. The moment he caught sight of this great pointed hill, with the massive deserted church tower on its summit, he felt conscious that here was something that suited his nature better than he expected anything to have done in these parts.

Mr. Evans, speaking in his second manner, told him that it was the tower of St. Michael the Archangel. “I am glad,” said John, “that St. Michael's tower was the first thing I saw here!” But in his heart he thought, “To the Devil with St. Michael! That tower is nothing but a tall pile of stones. I like that tower—I shall go up to that tower at the first chance!”

But Mr. Evans in his tormented mind cared nothing whether John liked the tower or not. He was crying, like a lost spirit, “0 Cross of Christ! 0 Cross of Christ! 0 Cross of Christ!”

Thus did these two, the man from Wales and the man from Norfolk, enter the silent streets of the town of Glastonbury.

HIC JACET

The Reverend Mat Dekker, Vicar of Glastonbury, was working in his garden. He was loosening the earth round his long, straight rows of potatoes, while his son Sam was going backward and forward with an old wheelbarrow to a smouldering rubbish heap under the high wall upon which he deposited the weeds which his father pulled up.

Mat Dekker was a man of sixty. A widower from his only child's birth, twenty-five years ago, his powerfully banked-up affections had long concentrated themselves upon two objects: upon Christ, the Redeemer of his soul, and upon Sam, the son of his loins. It was about ten months this March since the lad had taken his degree at Cambridge; and the first serious misunderstanding between father and son was even now, month by month, gathering weight and momentum. It had to do with the young man's profession, and with the young man's first love-affair. Having brought him up with the constant idea of his taking orders, having seen him graduate with a creditable third-class in the Divinity Tripos, it is not difficult to imagine the crushing blow that fell upon the luckless father, when—the question arising as to what particular theological college he was now to enter —the lad gravely and resolutely declined to carry the thing a step further. And at that point the matter had hung fire for more than half a year. Refusing to give up hope of a change of heart in his son, Mat Dekker had followed the policy of complete inertness. Every opening in life, except unskilled manual labor, requiring the expenditure of some initial sum, the older man, without consciously tyrannising, acted on the assumption that economic pressure, negatively exercised, was the best weapon that age possessed in dealing with the wilfulness of youth

Apart from religion their tastes were unusually congenial. They both loved gardening, they both loved natural history, they both were proud and shy and anti-social. In their secluded Rectory, surrounded by walls fifteen feet high and faced even across the road by nothing mor* gregarious than the equally high walls oi the Abbey House, t!*cy were able to follow their hobbies as botanists, entomologists, geologists, ichthyologists, without cessation or interruption.

Mrs. Dekker had been a French Swiss from the city of Geneva. She had indeed been the pretty housemaid in this very house when Mr. Dekker took it over, and the girl with it, when he entered upon his labours in Glastonbury as a young bachelor priest some thirty years ago. But she had died in childbirth; and since that day there had been no more pretty housemaids; indeed it might be said that there had been no more women of any kind, within the Rectory walls.

For Penny Pitches, their one servant, could only be regarded as a woman under what Sir Thomas Browne would have called, in speaking of other difficult questions, “a wide solution.” Penny Pitches had lost her own baby just about the time of Sam's birth; and since that day she had been as good as a mother to Sam. She had suckled him, taught him his letters, taught him his manners—for she was not one to spare the rod—taught him his morality, his mother-wit, his legends and his superstitions. But with these female attributes, Penny Pitches' appearance was more gnomelike than anything else. She was undoubtedly the least human-looking anthropoid mammal in the whole county of Somerset. Penny Pitches was not deformed. She was no humpback. What Nature had done was to make her back so broad and her legs so short that she presented the appearance of a Playing-Card Queen of Spades; a Queen of Spades endowed with the privilege of three dimensions and the power of locomotion, but denied that natural separation of head from shoulders and of bust from hips which is the usual inheritance of female mortality. She was in fact an animated Euclidean Square moving about over the earth. Nature had, however, in order to compensate Penny for these peculiarities, given her a volubility of speech that was womanly and more than womanly. To speak the truth, the tongues of a dozen cantankerous shrews and a dozen loquacious trollops resided in this gnome-like skull.

It was Penny herself who now appeared upon the scene and standing between wheelbarrow and potato row delivered herself of her view of that morning's general outlook. “ Tis not that I querrel with 'ee for going out to 'lunch,' as they called it. That's as 'ee do please 'eeself about. What I do, and always shall, uphold is that for a person not to know 'inavarst' whether there's to be dinner on table or no dinner on table is a mock to reason.”

“Who told you that we were going out today, Penny?” protested Mr. Dekker mildly, leaning upon his fork. He was in his shirtsleeves and his large, rugged cheeks were redder than usual against the clipped grey whiskers that surrounded them. His chin and his upper lip were clean-shaven; and, as if to make up for this, his eyebrows above his formidable grey eyes were so long that they resembled a pair of thatched eaves.

“Wold man Weatherwax,” replied the Vicarage servant, “be round to me pantry with sarcy tales enough to turn milk in a pan I He do say that Miss Mary over the way have a cousin come to town what be lodging wi' Mr. Evans, the new Antiquities man who's looking after wold Jones' shop, who's to Hospital again with one of they little cysteses what do trouble he. 'A said 'twere a surprise to 'un—silly wold sinner as 'tis—that Miss Drew allowed of such doings. But I said to 'ee, I said, if Miss Drew thinks enough of Miss Mary's cousin to ask us to meet 'un, though 'a be a friend of their new Antiquity man, 'a must be one of they great factory people. Crow ain't no common name. Crow ain't no West-Country name, Crow ain't. And our Miss Mary, as us do know, be related to they rich folks. So I be come straight to 'ee, Master, to reason wi5 'ee as to why, when 'ee be going out for dinner, ye haven't let us so much as hear a word of it.”

“I was just this very minute coming to tell you of our invitation, Penny,” murmured the clergyman. “It hadn't arrived at breakfast. In fact Weatherwax must have brought it. I suppose there's no excuse for us, eh, Sam?” and he glanced humorously, from above the rim of his spectacles and from beneath his bushy eyebrows, at the lad on the further side of the wheelbarrow.

Young Sam Dekker answered the look with a grin. Then he suddenly got red. “You've not forgotten, Father,” he said, “that you promised to have tea at Whitelake Cottage with the Zoylands?”

Before Mr. Dekker could reply to this, Penny Pitches turned angrily on the lad. “And you're dragging the Master out over they girt marshes, are ye, too, then? It's that little white scut of a Missy Zoyland ye be after, Sam Dekker; and don't 5ee forget that I told 'ee of it! Oh, I do know 'ee, I do know 'ee, Sammy, me blessed babe! 'Tis a daffadowndilly day, like this day be, that leads to these unholy doings. On days like this day 'tis hard for young men to bide quiet at home and take their cup of tea with their dad, brought sweet and strong to 'un by such as knows what a minister's table should be. A lot you care, Master Sam, what poisonous foreign sweetmeats your dad'll have to eat, and what devil's dam drinks he'll have to drink, out there over Splott's Moor. It's thik Missy Zoyland ye be after. Look at's cheeks, Master! Look at's hot cheeks!”

“I didn't know Mrs. Zoyland had a daughter, Penny,” remarked the Rector gently, looking anywhere except in the direction of his son's confusion.

“I never said she had, Master,” averred the woman stoutly, glancing at her embarrassed foster-child with a defiant glare.

“Penny's thinking of that Fair at Hornblotton, Father, when I took Mrs. Zoyland on the merry-go-round with me. You were there yourself. You saw us. I'd be ashamed to say such unkind things of a quiet little lady like that, Penny!”

“I baint said nothing about no quiet lady,” protested Mrs. Pitches. “My words be to do wi' a young master, what stands afore us, among these here 'taties.”

“Well, Penny,” said Mr. Dekker with decision, “I'm afraid it looks, anyhow, as if you'd be a lone woman today. Sam's quite right. I did promise the Zoylands to walk over to Whitelake River this afternoon and I did tell Weatherwax that we would come across to lunch. Did Miss Drew send for any brandy as I told her to?”

“Brandy!” cried Penny Pitches in high dudgeon. “Ye'll have plenty of brandy left, ye will, if ye go giving it round to all the old maids in Silver Street!”

“But, my dear Penny,” said Mat Dekker, stretching out his long white-shirted arm across the handles of the wheelbarrow and taking the woman caressingly by the shoulder, “Miss Drew sent Weatherwax for that brandy that we might drink it at lunch, we and Mary's new cousin; so I do hope you've not been crotchety and refused it to him.”

“Refused it!” The words came like a bullfrog's croak from the geometrical centre of that well-aproned human square that had planted itself before them. “Thik wold Weatherwax be settled in me chair, in me pantry, at me table this blessed minute. Refused it! Why, he's 'been tasting thik brandy for the last hour. He says he be tasting it to see if it be the same as Miss Drew had from *ee at Christmas. If it be the same, he'll take it over, he says, same as she told he to. And I do tell he that if it's not the same there'll be no need to worry about leaving it in bottle; for bottle'll be like thee own stummick, Master, on Sunday morn! Bottle'll be empty andtinklin'!”