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Pleased with the way these paragraphs sounded in his mind and finding in his broodings over the word Esplumeoir a strange vibration of peace, Mr. Evans had emerged from his threshold that morning,—but now *etll was different. As he traversed that little dark staircase from shop to cellar and from cellar to shop, carrying many enormous armfuls of books, he found his mood of dreamy self-satisfaction changed into something else. Number Two was scrupulously honest in his handling of their diurnal gains, which, with the increase of foreign visitors, began to grow very considerably. He kept two large collecting-boxes, one of them with the letters “G.C.”—Glastonbury Commune—written in pencil on it, and he divided all their increment into two portions and then sub-divided their own share.

During the time that Mr. Evans was bringing up these books, the shop was crowded with people; and old Jones had all he could do to deal with the pushing and jostling that was taking place.

But he was right about the books. Not a German, not a Russian entered, but he began turning over the pages of these books; while not a Frenchman came in, but he wanted to see all the china ornaments that the establishment boasted. . This learned interest in their stock of books—most of which were old parchment folios—kept Mr. Evans at his job; but his mood had completely changed. And in a most subtle way it had changed; for while his broodings were still upon his mystical interpretation of the word Esplumeoir there slipped into his thoughts certain episodes in the earlier life of his magician which led insensibly to his subterranean temptation.

He recalled, for instance, that occasion when Merlin came rushing down in a howling storm from the forest hills driving before him a herd of stags, himself riding upon the back of the hindmost, and rending off one of its great horns, flung this wild weapon at the daring chieftain who was stealing the magician's wife.

The dark and bloody violence of this scene disturbed the current of Mr. Evans' mind. Something in the sinister action of tearing out that branched horn by its roots reminded him of a deadly, a most perilous passage in “The Unpardonable Sin.” The evil tide was indeed full upon him now. With trembling knees he put down his candle—for little daylight could enter that cellar—and snatching the book from its place by St. Augustine, he began feverishly turning its pages till he found that abominable and terrible passage.

His hands shook so much and his knees knocked together so violently, as he gloated over this dreadful scene, that anyone beholding him would have supposed him to be the victim of St Vitus' dance. The man's bones seemed to melt within him as he read on and on now, passing from this passage to another and from that to another, till all sense of place or time was completely lost The long winter months in which he had lived so happily with Cordelia fell away from him like a cinematograph picture passing across an artificial screen.

Nothing in the world seemed to matter, nothing in the world seemed of the least importance, compared with the overpowering mania that re-possessed him now. It returned upon him with all the more irresistible power because of his long suppression of it. Had anyone been down there watching his face they would have seen that he was biting his lower lip so violently—sucking it indeed into his mouth as well as biting it—that his whole countenance was transfigured. His nostrils kept twitching, opening and shutting like those of a savage stallion, and his eyes burned with so insane a light that one could fancy that they would actually cause the paper upon which these atrocious things were written to smoulder and shrivel like leaves held into a consuming flame.

The man's absorption in his frenzied vice was so horribly complete that when the door at the top of the staircase opened and Number Two's voice called upon him to come ifp into« the shop it was no more than if he had heard a moth beating against the wall. But a moment came—for even in the throes of a cerebral excitement driven to a pitch like this a human being grows aware of that calling horizon that we name the future, those beckoning fluctuating cross-roads, those bridges—Perilous, Pomparles Bridge, Eel Bridge, Sword Bridge, Water Bridge, that make a person feel that wicked thoughts are not enough—a moment came when Mr. Evans resolved to do something. It was no vague thing that he resolved to do; for his imaginative projection was as concrete and palpable as the worst of these silhouettes of horror engraved in the holy excess of sadistic satisfaction, by Dante's rationalized dementia.

He now closed the leaves of the book, letting the page that had overpowered him fall down upon its neighbour as delicately as a person might cover up a wound with its own eroded skin.

He rose to his full height and possessed himself of the candle. His knees ceased to knock together, his pulses ceased their frantic tattoo, the beads of sweat on his forehead began to dry. It was the curious phase in the pitiful evolution of temptation when the insane desire sinks down and sinks in, and the practical resolution of what we are going to do hardens and crystallises in all the veins and fibres.

There is no longer now any localised sensual stir in the person's being. All is diffused, all is spread out through body, soul and spirit. The man does not only want to do this abominable thing with his wrought-up sex-nerve, he wants to do it with his whole nature. That sex-nerve is still at the bottom of it. But that nerve of imaginative evil, now so quietly coiled up—only its little radium-burning eye, of glacier-livid tint, crossed by flickering red levin, remaining alert, only its forked tongue quivering like a compass needle—has projected its dynamic energy through the whole organism, has converted the whole organism into its obedient slave, so that its immediate functioning can lie latent.

And the most dangerous aspect of this diffused energy, which now fills the man's whole nature, so that his intellect is inspired by it and his soul is inspired by it and his spirit is inspired by it, is its deadly cunning.

That little coiled-up nerve-snake, now suddenly grown so innocently quiescent that if Mr. Evans were to strip himself naked there would have been nothing'indecent in the exposure, gathered the dynamic energy which it spread through his whole being directly from the First Cause.

In the nature of the First Cause there are two windows of manifestation corresponding most precisely to the eyes of such creatures as have no more than two eyes. From one of these slits into the Infinite pours forth good; from the other evil.

When Spinoza taught * that the will of God was limited by the nature of God, he was not deducing such doctrine from his intimate experience but from his mathematical reason. Intimate experience of reality—whether it be the experience of the First Cause or of any one of its innumerable creatures—is always reporting “magic, mystery, and miracle” and, along with these, an unbounded faith in the power of the will to change the Tiature of the organism. The whole stream of what is called Evolution depends on this autocreativeness of living things. Nor is there any creature that does not share with the First Cause the power of being good or being evil at its own intrinsic will.

It is the created, not the creator, who. so constantly produce good out of evil; and this they do of their absolute free-will. Certain created souls have indeed willed the good rather than the evil so- habitually—and these souls are not confined to the human race—that they have rendered themselves impervious to the evil Eye of the First Cause and porous only to the Eye of infinite compassion. The Mr. Evans who now issued forth from Number Two's basement and blew out his candle at the top of those narrow stairs was a Mr. Evans whose will, for that crisis in his life, was entirely evil and whose cunning craftiness in the achievement of his outrageous intention, was supernatural in its flexibility.

“I forget if I told you, Mr. Jones,” he said, pulling on his tight black overcoat with twenty times the ease with which he had pulled it off, for no overcoats, no fur-tipped jackets either, slip on so quickly as the ones that are destined for a wicked quest, “that I've got an appointment this morning with Father Paleologue?”

“Aye? What's that? Do you mean you're going, Sir?”

"Father Paleologue. You will remember him if you think a little! He brought a collection of icons to> sell for his monastery. A Greek monk he is. Catholic monks are discouraged from coming here—their authorities know, by a secret tradition of scholastic warning, what the Twilight, 'Yr Echwyd,' really means, to which the Grail leads.w

Number Two stared at him. “Pardon me, Marm,” he murmured to the lady he was waiting upon.

“I've had very few o' they High Cones in me shop,” he went on speaking quietly and earnestly to Mr. Evans. “Do ?ee think there'll be a big enough demand for such things as they, to make it worth our------” •

But Mf. Evans was already talcing down his bowler hat from the peg where it always rested.

“I'll bring you back a couple in my pocket to show you, Mr. Jones, and I'm sure you'll agree------”

The truth was that Number Two, although no bad judge of a portrait of John Locke, when he saw one, had never seen an icon and had not the faintest notion what such a thing looked like.

Bui Mr. Evans had opened the street door and was gone; while Old Jones, turning to his customer with an air of confiding all the eccentricilies of his partner to her intelligent ear, said somelhing about the study of High Cones being one of those branches of his profession that he'd never aspired to. “Do you happen to have picked up a few on 'em, in your travels, Marm?”

While the lady stared at this curious purveyer of rarities, Number Two's partner was some distance down the street, walking very fast towards the Cattle Market. When he reached the entrance to Dickery Cantle's tavern, he opened the door marked “Tap” a little way and peeped in. The tap-room was full of beer drinkers and the air was thick with smoke.

Mrs. Cantle, a pale, worn-out woman, was serving at the bar, assisted by her son Elphin.

*Mr. Evans opened the door a little further and remained hesitating.

The small place was so crowded, for it was a favourite resort among those of the Glastonbury unemployed who could lay hands on a penny or two, that neither Mrs. Cantle nor Elphin —nor indeed anyone in the room—noticed that hooked nose, and those gleaming eyes under the bowler hat, snuffing and peering in the entrance like the Devil at Auerbach's Cellar.

Backward and forward went the thin white arm of Mrs. Cantle above the counter; to and fro went the thin, frail figure of Elphin among the little tables in front of the wooden seats. It must have been a scene that with certain trifling differences in cut of costume and tone of voice went back to the time when Glastonbury was a mediaeval town of no small importance.

There was not a man here this morning among those drinking who had not come, to forget Us troubles and there was not a man among all these men who had not already realised that purpose in the thick smoke-filled air with its strong smell of beer and cheese and masculine sweat.

The present dictators of Glastonbury—that is to say, Dave Spear, Paul Trent and Red Robinson—would of a surety never have dared officially to interfere with the national regulations about the closing hours of public houses, but when once the local police-force, represented in this case by Bob Sheperd, had received a hint in favour of greater laxity from the mayor of the town, it became easy for the smaller taverns, like St. Michael's on Chilkwell Street, and Dickery's at the Cattle Market, to admit a group of habitual customers, while keeping their blinds down and their shutters closed. Such a group this morning then, at a time when the public bar at the Pilgrims' was authentically shut, was enjoying itself after the fashion of their ancestors and talking loudly about the new commune. No one took the least notice of the gaunt bowler-hatted individual hesitating in the doorway and searching the room with an eye of wild expectancy. Apparently he found what he wanted for he gave vent to a sudden sound between a laugh and a groan. His hesitation came at once to an end now. Closing the door very softly behind him he moved through the smoke and the noisy crowd, past the little tables and the wooden benches, till he reached the counter. Here he stood in complete silence till he caught the landlady's eye.

“Good morning, Mr. Heavings,” said Mrs. Cantle in a faint voice. “Have 'ee come about what Dickery do owe Old Jones, for thik second-'and bed and they 'arf a dozen bedroom chairs?”

“Certainly not, Mam,” muttered Mr. Evans. “I've come . . . I've come for . . . I've come to . . . have a drink and look round a bit.”

“What are ye taking, Mr. Heavings? Straight Scotch, or a peg of Our Special?”

Since neither she nor her husband ever touched a drop of what they sold this latter alternative was understood by everyone in the room to refer to a brand of liquour, more polent even than Mother Legge's Bridgewater punch, which had mellowed for generations in a great butt in the famous Cantle cellar.

The truth was that Our Special was a species of old sack that the years had converted into a liquid gold that was heady and heartening to a degree unparalleled save perhaps by the contents of one of the great historic casks at Bremen. Only the boldest visitors paid their half-a-crowns for a sip of this ancestral firewater; and a spot of colour came into the hollow cheeks of the thin lady when Mr. Evans, ignorant of the formality of this ofier, murmured his preference for the select beverage.

“Us can't afford to treat 'ee to 'un, Mr. Heavings. Thee dost know that, don't 'ee?”

As a reply to this the tall Welshman put his hand into his pocket and produced a big handful of loose silver. “Will that pay for a double glass, Mam?” he enquired.

She gave him one of those quick nervous looks that women of all classes are in the habit of giving when in the presence of some striking evidence of masculine extravagance. “ Twould pay for a three times over,” she said.

“Give me just that, please, Mrs. Cantle—a 'three times over.'”

“I baint responsible, Mr. Heavings, if a three times of Our Special sends thee's stumick into thee's head!”

The smile, if it could be called a smile, with which the unfortunate man replied to* this warning, awed the woman into obedience. “ Twill cost 'ee the best of ten shillingses,” she said solemnly as she turned to give the order to Elphin. Elphin had been gazing in mute wonder for some while at this unusual customer.