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If Mr. Evans had caught a glimpse of Mrs. Geard through the window he would have shot off again, but fortunately the two women were seated out of sight of the window, so that it wasn't till he opened the parlour door that he knew she was there. Cordelia recognised at once that something was very wrong with him; for he stood in the doorway muttering about Dr. Fell, Bob Sheperd, Germans, rounders, Miss Elizabeth Crow fainting •on Wirral Hill, and his having an appointment at sunset that night ... a very important appointment ... at sunset . . . with Father Paleologue ... at sunset . . . about some icons.

The mother and daughter were both of them on their feet, looking at him with an uneasy stare, Cordy with a passionate and frightened stare, Mrs. Geard with a worried and anxious stare. “I hope he has not been going to the bank,” the latter thought to herself; and in her heart she began wondering whether icons were some species of familiar spirits, like her own Pembrokeshire fairies, that this Mr. Paleologue claimed he could conjure up.

“I only came in to tell you, Cordelia,” said Mr. Evans now in a clearer, more intelligible manner, “that I've got to send Dr. Fell to Wirral Hill, where Miss Crow lies unconscious. After I've been there, I've got this engagement at . . . at sunset. Did I say sunset? Yes, at sunset. I hope you are feeling very well, Cousin Megan?”

At this actual moment, towards this man in a disordered state of mind—an iron bar tapping on the inside door of his locked-up intention—and towards two women staring at this man in bewildered uneasiness, the First Cause poured forth its double magnetic streams of white and black vibrations. Out of Nothing, out of pre-existing vortices of energy that themselves issued from Nothing by the creative will of this Being, Mr. Evans, his wife, and his wife's mother had been created. In them the First Cause reproduced itself, the Macrocosm in these three microcosms; and, like the First Cause, these three persons, Mr. Evans standing in the doorway, Cordelia standing by her husband's writing desk, and Mrs. Geard standing by the purple chair, had the power of giving themselves up to the good in their nature or to the evil.

For Mr. Evans could at that very moment, even as he gazed fat thai picture of the river, the woman and the boat, which he associated with the word Esplumeoir, have transformed himself into a saint as devoted, as spiritual, as tenderly considerate as Sam Dekker, who in his normal state was a good deal less like a saint than Mr. Evans was! This he might have done, even as he stood there, after telling these plain-faced women, while the mother-of-pearl sunlight flickered into the room, those lies about Father Paleologue; and in doing so have rendered himself morally superior to the First Cause, if it had not been that from the word Esplumeoir his mind reverted to Merlin's early life and to that incident of the horn of the stag. “So good-bye, Cordy. So good-bye, Cousin Megan. I must get hold of Dr. Fell and I must meet Father Paleologue.”

This moment was a moment of such a fatal parting of the ways, that the Invisible Watchers who were standing at the brink of the deep Glastonbury Aquarium, watching the motions of its obsessed animalculae, had never crowded more eagerly around their microscope to learn what the issue would be. It all depended upon which of the two vibrations proceeding from the First Cause Cordelia would welcome and which she would reject. The destructive vibration, at this important crisis, willed her to be cold, chaste, inert, irresponsible, absorbed in her own personal condition, which had never been more interesting to her!

The creative vibration, on the contrary, willed her to be warm, alluring, unchaste, and self-forgetful, thinking only of her love for the unhappy man before her! In her earlier relations with Mr. Evans, Cordy had frequently been stupid and remiss; but the “sweet usage” to which her ungainly form had been subjected, and the caresses by which her cold nerves had been quickened, had changed, all this. It was not that she had come to understand the nature of his perversion; but she had come to understand, to a nicety, the place in his consciousness where that closed chamber was, and to be an adept in the art of keeping it closed. She had discovered that by certain devices—devices into which it is not necessary just now to follow her—it was possible to give Mr. Evans so much erotic excitement, of an abnormal, but perfectly harmless kind, that his soul could go up and down past that locked-up chamber without a thought of the temptations it contained.

It was lucky for Mr. Evans that at this crisis Cordelia was fully aware that to be inert and irresponsible would have been a devilish sin. The vibration of eternal creative energy which poured down into her nerves from that remote double-natured Force at the root of all life was now deliberately welcomed by the spirited girl and the opposite vibration heroically rejected. She moved up hurriedly to Mr. Evans, got behind him, drew him forward by the sleeve till she got him to the hearth; and then, linking her arm in his, turned emphatically and imperatively to Mrs. Geard.

“Mother!”

“Yes, Cordy.”

"I want you to call at Dr. Fell's. It won't take you so very far out of your way if you go by the allotment gardens and that alley I showed you the other day. And just tell him, or Miss Barbara, if he's out, what Owen has said about Miss Crow having fainted—by those seats, wasn't it, Owen?—on Wirral Hill, and those Germans looking after her. I expect she's all right by this time; or someone else has gone for the doctor; but in any case do go quick, Mother, please, because I can see Owen's very worried about it/'

There were no doubt some quick private glances between mother and daughter after this, in which ihe mother said: “What's up, my dear? Has he been drinking?” and the daughter said: “Don't ask me now, but just go! I'll tell you everything another time”—but the upshot was that Mrs. Geard hurried off.

The good lady's lilac-coloured bonnet rose up like a flag of onset from her grey head as she walked down Wells Old Road, and her old-fashioned velvet-sided boots delivered short quick taps to the brick pavement under the railings of those red-tiled houses, and every now and then she automatically unclicked and clicked-up the metal fastening of her purse, as if she were rejecting all assistance from Mr. Robert Stilly in the management of her affairs. “I cannot think why John keeps going to the bank,” she kept saying to herself as she crossed the allotments.

Mr. Evans was now alone with Cordelia; and the first thing the girl did was something that at once provoked a faint flicker of natural erotic excitement in the man's perverted nerves. She began pulling down the parlour's brown blinds upon that sunset period of the day. Woman-like, she had absolutely no notion of the explosives she was handling, of the volcano-fires under the crater-surface she was stirring up. But woman-like, too, she, who had been virgin so long, was a cunninger adept than a thousand Thaises in the primeval arts of provocation. Daughter of Bloody Johnny as she was, her own erotic nature, now that it had been once excited was inexhaustible in its amorous devices; and since her moods and her lures were forever changing, Mr. Evans was in the position of the fortunate possessor of a whole harem of ardent play-fellows. In none of her Cyprian disguises could poor Cordy be called pretty; but wanton and freshly blooming she certainly coidd be called; such is the magical power of Eros.

She had a surprise for her man now. Pulling down the blinds of their Liny parlour on the general principle announced so often by Mother Legge, that she “could not abide onlookers,” and throwing her hat and cloak on their big arm-chair she went up to the fireplace where a newly lit flame was making the wood crackle, and leaning against the edge of the mantelpiece, she began a rapid flow of excited words. She was going, she told him, without any doubt, to have a child. She had already gone two months with it. She had been yesterday to see Dr. Fell about it. It would be born sometime in September.

Mr. Evans dropped his bowler hat on the floor and sank down exhausted in his black overcoat on the big purple chair. Half of her jacket and the rim of her hat were squeezed under him as he sank down, for she had just come in when her mother arrived; but he did not make the least move to extricate them. Nor indeed did she! Watching him with swimming eyes she waited in silence for what she hoped and prayed would prove to be a rush of natural emotion at what she had told him. And drawn towards tb^m by the intensity of their feeling, drawn towards this embryo grandchild of Geard of Glastonbury, there came floating into that room through the pulled-down blinds a flock of obscure, half-material presences, the sort of etherealised thought-projections that are liable to hover over certain crises in human lives. Like invisible birds these presences gathered, sweeping into the room out of the aqueous mists of that unusual day, gibbering and chittering to one another and circling about Cordelia.

Neither the man nor the woman, he in the purple chair whose tasselled valances swept the floor, and she leaning against the flimsy mantelpiece, could have been conscious at that moment that this embryo in the room with them was beginning to assert itself as an entity with its own contact with the life-mysteries. What they both felt just then as these thought-elementals fluttered round the new life in Cordelia's womb, as blow-flies are attracted to carrion, or as humming-bird moths to the hearts of carnations, was something very different from these ethereal visitors. What they were aware of was the dumb, numb, cold, heavy downward drag of the vast undersea forces that are subhuman; chemical forces, that belong to that formless world of the half-created and the half-organic whereof bodies of lower dimensions than ours are composed and which has a mysterious weight that draws down, a pull, a tug, a centripetal gravitation, against which the soul within us struggles and upon the surface of which it swims, and over which, when the process of decomposition commences, it spreads its contemptuous wings.

This down-dragging sensation in their nerves neutralized and counter-balanced these half-embodied air-presences, the elemental projections of old magical minds upon that sensitised Glastonbury air, floating like a cloud of disturbed river gnats through those lowered brownish-coloured afternoon blinds, out again into that subaqueous mist, out again into the wide water-meadows.

No philosopher has yet appeared who has realised as it should be realised, the creative power of the human mind. Behind these brownish-coloured, pulled-down blinds on the way to St. Edmund's pottery, where all those little town-council houses carried their red-tiled roofs so trim, there emerged from Cordelia's mind as she stood with her staring, swimming, dazed eyes fixed on her mate and her awkward elbow propped on that ridiculous mantelpiece, such an intensity of feeling that it had the power to draw out of the air, although she knew it not, these wandering half-lives. Any clairvoyant sense could have seen them there hovering about her body, and making their weak, chittering signals to the subhuman progeny of her womb, whose embryo consciousness must have been on a level with their own half-created fumblings. But why did this thick, dumb, numb, down-dragging pull of cosmic entropy, this dark gravitation-weight, sinking into decomposition and dissolution, tug at those two just then, at the man in the purple chair, with the tasselled valances trailing upon the floor, and at the woman who had just told him he was a begetter? Was it because—with that iron bar hammering to get out from its locked-up prison—Mr. Evans' fungus-grown mind groped amid after-births and abortions and corpses dead in their travail?

Whatever the cause may have been of what happened to those two behind those drawn blinds, both visitations came and went in no more than a hundred tickings of the watch in the man's pocket. Phenomena that pass so quickly—thought-eLementals floating in and floating out, and this death-cold touch of the draught of decomposition—surely they are beneath notice, beneath analysis, beneath explanation? On the contrary, the very essence of life is revealed in such fleeting impressions; and in experiences such as these Eternity itself can be heard moaning and weeping, as its Cimmerian waters advance and recede around the lamplit promontories of Time.

“What shall we call him if he's a boy, Owen?” Her voice just then was more than he could bear. Nothing makes human nerves dance with such blind fury as a voice piercing the hollow of the ear at the moment when the will is stretched out like a piece of India rubber on the rack of indecision.

“Torture!” he shouted, sitting up in the purple chair and clutching its elbows furiously, while the rim of her hat was now completely crushed beneath him. “We'll call him Torture; and if she's a girl we'll call her Finis, the End. For she'll be the end. And all is the end.”

Cordy's face went white, white as the surface of the little china pussy-cat which Crummie had given her, and which now fell over sideways as she jerked her arm from the mantelpiece. But she wasn't the daughter of Geard of Glastonbury for nothing. Incontinently she rushed straight to his side.

“You're unhappy, Owen; you're ill; you're hurt. Something horrible's troubling you.”

He pushed her arms away. He lurched to his feet. He bent down and picked up his bowler hat which was lying on its smooth crown, its dirty interior uppermost. “It's nearly sunset,” he muttered. “If I don't go now I'll never go.”

“Where are you going, Owen?”

He looked at her wildly. “Well! he must be stopped, mustn't he? It's one thing or the other, isn't it?”

“What are you talking about, Owen? Are you crazy?”

“Oh, nothing . . . nothing . . . nothing . . . nothing!” he muttered. “You don't want to see me in the dock, do you? In the dock, woman!” These last words came from him with a wild shout.

Cordy glanced at the brown blinds which were bulging a little. There was a wind blowing up. She went to the door leading into the passage, locked it, and placed her back against it. “You don't leave this room, Owen,” she gasped.

He was now buttoning up his black overcoat. His hat was on his head, pressed down so low over his eyes that his eyebrows were invisible. This produced a most curious effect as he glared at her from under its shadow. But an unexpected change of mood came upon him. He began wheedling and coaxing and imploring.