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Abashed and uneasy, Paul Trent, instead of putting out his hand to take the proffered liquour, addressed himself nervously to Crummie. “You'd better not come any further, Miss Geard,” he said. “They'll have taken your mother off by this time. You'd better make straight for Wirral. Depend on it you'll find her there now. That's just how people come to grief, wading madly through the water to get to their homes.”

But Crummie tossed these words aside. “Drink what he gives you, when you have the chance,” she said, “and don't be silly.”

Under the weight of the combined authority of father and daughter Paul Trent received the brandy from the Mayor and put it to his lips. Deep and long did he drink; and when he returned the flask his voice had a very different tone. “Avanti!” he cried. “Let's get into any boat that can carry us, and do some more roof-climbing!”

The last few hours in the life of Paul Trent had been more stirring and exciting than any he had ever known; and there came now to both father and daughter one of the queerest sensations they had ever known when from the raised footpath under the great Tithe Barn they actually encountered those rushing waters. The first sight of that brownish flood, flecked with foam that had ceased to be foam, foam that had become a whitish scum entangled with every sort of floating refuse, was something that no one who saw it could forget until the day of his death. More dramatic sights, more tragic sights might follow, and did follow for hoth Bloody Johnny and his daughter that day, hut it was that first impression of the power of the waters that sank into the girl's mind and returned to her afterward, again and again, to the last hour of her consciousness. The things that she saw floating upon that turbid flood were what lodged themselves most in Crummie's mind. Dead puppies, dead kittens, dead chickens, children's dolls, children's toys, bits of broken furniture, pieces of furniture that were not broken but were upside down and horribly disfigured—such were some of the objects she caught sight of, as they stood on that stone-flagged curb with the flood swirling at their feet. She saw towel-horses and laundry baskets. She saw wicker cradles, and pitiful wooden chairs with their legs in the air. And these were only 4 few of the intimate utensils of human life that were exposed in that primeval indecency to the eye of the onlooker as the eddying torrent whirled them forward. Fire is the great devourer; but it is so swift and deadly with its blinding flames and suffocating smoke, that it spreads a kind of vacuum round it, a psychic vacuum, created by the annihilating suction of that Heraclitean force which is the beginning and the end of all life. Water, on the other hand, except in the wildest tempests at sea, kills more calmly, paralyses more slowly; and the terror that it creates does not shrivel up the normal nerves of our human awareness. For this very reason the slow ghastliness of death by water seems more natural to humanity than the swift horror of death by fire. 1 It was a quaint example of the obstinate self-assertion of human beings that now, as they were waiting there, Paul Trent took upon himself to point out that a flood was the sort of occasion when governments and states showed what frauds they were. “There'll be a boat this way in a minute,” he said, “but it'll be rowed by private people, not the soldiers!” The lawyer's teeth-chatterings and shiverings had ceased after that deep drink from the Mayor's flask. “It's like Venice. It's like waiting for a gondola,” he chuckled with a leer.

Bloody Johnny's bare head was bent forward a little as he fronted the rushing, swirling torrent at his feet, but his eyes were turned westward in their deep sockets, and were staring intently at the corner of Silver Street, round which the expected boat seemed most likely to appear. Crummie stooped down and turned up several times the bottoms of her father's black trousers, revealing his loose, bedraggled bootlaces. 'There's a boat! There's two of 'em!" cried Mr. Geard. Two boats did indeed now appear, shooting round the corner of Silver Street with a great deal of splashing and shouting. Both were rowed, in spite of the anarchist's prediction, by a soldier; but in one of them was a large and huddled group of sobbing children, while in the other, a much bigger boat, save for the figures of Lily and Louie Rogers clinging tightly to each other in the stern, there was nobody at all.

The young soldier who was rowing the large boat w^as evidently totally unused to handling oars and it was his clumsiness, angrily rebuked by the older man in the crowded boat, that produced the splashing and confusion. Every time his oar slipped, or got caught between the rushing water and the wooden rowlock, Lily would turn an appealing glance, like the gaze of a Christian Martyr in an early Victorian print, towards the older soldier whom the helpless oarsman seemed to be addressing as corporal.

“Tike the lidy aboard, Bill!” now commanded the corporal. “Tike the two gents as well. Blime me! Do 'ee think yer goin' to do nothink but row young lidies? Do 'ee think yer in Wyemouth Bye, of a Satur-die arternoon? Tike the three on 'em aboard at once! Pull with yer other oar, ye bleedin' bibe! The other one, yer prize fool, the other one. Gawd damn yer! Yer 11 brike that oar to bits in a jiffy. Stand up, yer fool! Stand up, and pull it out o' the bloody water! Gawd, Almighty! was there ever such a ninny born of man's 'oly seed!”

The martyrised glances of Lily, lovely in her pallor, seemed to increase the bewilderment of the hapless young soldier even more than the abuse of his corporal Three times the big canal-boat from Bridgewater was carried by the flood past the place where the three stood. At the fourth attempt, when it looked as if the corporal, purple with rage, would soon be upsetting his own load of now screaming children, Paul Trent, wading up to his knees in the brown flood, clambered into the boat. “What have you done with your mistress?” he threw out hurriedly to the sisters Rogers as he regained his balance.

“Miss Drew couldn't leave her things, Sir,” murmured Lily faintly. Once inside the unwieldy craft—for there were other oars under its seats—the lawyer had no difficulty in bringing it so close to their vantage ground that both father and daughter could clamber in without entering the water. Both Mr. Geard and Crummie were staggered at the sight that awaited them when the keel of their boat grounded at last in the trodden mud at the foot of Wirral Hill.

All Glastonbury seemed to have taken refuge on this eminence and there were terrific hummings and dronings from the air and frantic screams from the hillside, and wild contradictory cries from both above and below, as several private airplanes and a couple of capacious military aircraft landed and re-started again in a roped-off enclosure. In fact the whole of the southern portion of Wirral Hill had been by that time taken over by the authorities and it was perhaps the best distraction that the terrified children of Glastonbury could possibly have had, the thrill of watching these constant landings and departures and seeing so many soldiers. Army tents had already been put up and sackcloth shelters; and the whole hillside was a tumultuous scene of confusion. Parents with convulsed faces and distracted wits were rushing about looking for children they had lost, and a wildly struggling crowd kept fighting to get to the flood's edge at the arrival of every boatload that reached the hill from the submerged portions of the town. It was the aged town clerk, struggling among the crowd at the water's edge, who was the messenger sent by Mrs. Geard to bring them to the tent the officials had set apart for her, and Crummie was so caught up out of herself by the wild scene before her, that she kissed the old gentleman when he turned to her from some altercation that he was having with a small boy. “What's that?” she asked, noticing in Mr. Bishop's hands a curiously bound book that looked as if it had been floating in the flood for several hours. “A boy here picked it up out of the water,” replied the old man gravely. “It's about pardoning sin; but I've lost my glasses.”

As Bloody Johnny stepped from the boat upon the slope of Wirral Hill he first glanced back at the level expanse of brown water and then turned and surveyed the singular scene of shocking disorder and scrambling confusion which that familiar grassy eminence offered to his view. It was indeed a unique spectacle. Its movement and agitation carried an aura completely different from anything he had ever seen. It was not like a fair at Yeovil. It was not like a military field day at Dorchester. It was not like a scene on Weymouth Beach. On the other hand it was not like a refuge camp in war, famine, or pestilence. A certain minority of the younger people there—especially lads between seventeen and twenty whose relatives were in no danger—were evidently hugely enjoying the excitement. But the queer thing was that everyone seemed to carry some flood-mark about them. Their clothes were wet or they were mud-stained, or some particular article of attire was missing. They would have resembled the inhabitants of a town escaping from a bombardment save that the fear of water, the flood-panic, evokes an utterly different atmosphere from the fear of bursting shells or exploding bombs. A flood-panic is a steady and continuous presence lacking in the expectancy of anything crashing oar deafening. A flood-panic is essentially a silent thing; and in this respect has nothing of the wild distraction of a shipwreck, or of an ocean-storm, or of a mob-riot.

“Out of the way there, please!” Two men were lifting a woman's body from a boat to the land. The Mayor recognized Dr. Fell as one of them and he laid his hand on his arm. The doctor greeted him; and addressed by name the man at the dead woman's feet. “Stop a bit, Dickery, it's Mr. Geard!”

No one knew better than Dickery Cantle who it was, but he was so dazed and stupefied that all he could do was to tighten his hold upon the ankles of his burden, as if Mr. Geard were a body-snatcher.

“I've been trying to revive her for an hour, Geard,” went on Dr. Fell, “but it's no use. She's out of it God! I wish / were!”

But Bloody Johnny did not hear him. If he had said “Tve decided to take those tablets tonight and end the whole thing,” the Mayor would not have heard him. The Mayor's attention was rivetted upon the body in their arms which was of extraordinary beauty, though a bloody scar from a recent fall crossed her forehead.

“Who is she,” asked Mr. Geard. “I don't know her. She has a lovely face. Who is she?”

“She's Jenny Morgan. She's the mother of that little girl Nelly. She's the woman Red Robinson wrote about in the Gazette till you stopped him. She was Mr. Crow's girl at one time.” “Is the child drowned too?”

The doctor shook his head. “This poor creature wouldn't have been drowned if she hadn't been practically dead-drunk. She was fishing things out of the water at the end of Dye House Lane. Her little girl was with her.”

“Where's the child now?” As he asked this question Mr. Geard noticed that some small insect, a minute beetle or fly it was, with tiny yellow stripes, was moving gingerly across the dead girl's face just as it would have done over a leaf or a stone. He flicked it off with his finger-nail. That she couldn't feel that small tickling seemed stranger than that she couldn't open her big eyes. “The child's with Comrade Robinson and his wife,” replied the doctor. "Nelly knows those two very well; better than she ever knew this beautiful creature, I expect. Well! you died the easiest

death, my dear, that anyone could die, just as easy as------“ Dr. Fell's mind wandered off from the calm face where the dark-fringed eyelids were covering those eyes that had always seemed too wide, as if they were forever seeing the things that normal people dodge, and he was thinking in his heart: ”It's funny . . . but I believe I've got a real idea while I've been holding this girl. Why don't I just simply leave Bibby in the house and take lodgings with this chap Dickery? Dave Spear lives there; and why shouldn't I? I could keep my clinic."

As he thought of this, and imagined the triumphant way in which he would lock up his consulting room in Manor House Road every time he left it, he suddenly caught upon Mr. Geard's face the most extraordinary expression he had ever seen on the countenance of any human being. Bloody Johnny had raised his hand again to the dead woman, this time to re-arrange a fold of her dress which her rescuers in their attempts to save her had disarranged. But no sooner had his hand encountered that ice-cold exposed bosom than he left it there, lying like a heavy horse-mushroom on the girl's breast. And with his hand resting there his face took upon itself the very expression of this dead woman. His eyes closed. His jaw fell open. His nostrils grew pinched and thin. Certain lines disappeared from his face altogether and certain completely new ones showed themselves.

“Are you faint? Are you ill, Mr. Geard?”' The doctor could not let go his hold upon Jenny Morgan, but the sound of his quick, anxious voice seemed enough without anything else to deliver the other from this curious sort of fit. His eyes flickered and opened, his nostrils quivered and expanded, his mouth closed tightly.

The doctor and Dickery Cantle moved off now with their burden and Mr. Geard was left standing by the water watching the manoeuvres of Paul Trent. But Crummie, who had carried Mr. Bishop off to ask him about her mother and had learned that Lord Brent had put aside one of the officers' tents for the Mayoress, now returned and asked who that woman was and whether she was dead. Her father dodged her questions about the dead girl and told her to thank Paul Trent and say good-bye to him. Paul Trent was still engaged in a struggle to be allowed to keep the big Bridgewater boat, but Crummie noticed that after he'd deposited Lily and Louie safely on the muddy grass he turned out the young soldier too. “Take these young ladies to the top of the hill, my lad,” he commanded, “and give them something hot to drink. Hi there! You look as if you could row! Come on in here and let's push off!”

His words were addressed to none other than Tommy Chin-nock. “Sure I can row, Mister Trent! Sure I can! I lamed it down to Bridport when I were wi5 uncle. I can row with two oars if I be wanted to!”

Paul Trent was considerate enough, however, to wait for the arrival of the young soldier's superior officer jggfore finally dismissing him.