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Meanwhile the sun began slanting its rays more and more warmly and mistily upon the group on the terrace. The smooth expanse of grass which separated them from the Ruins bore on its surface now a few dark, fluctuating shadows as the light wind stirred the elm-tree tops. The three hills of the place, Wirral Hill, Chalice Hill and the Tor, were all behind them, and beyond the Ruins and beyond the trees and beyond the vaporous roofs of the town, stretched the wide, low valley where flowed the River Brue, and where that Bridge Perilous was, into which, as Dekker was now telling him, Arthur had thrown his sword. Dim and rich and vague the valley stretched, covered with an undulating veil of blue-purple mist. Orchard upon orchard, pasture upon pasture, it sank away, the lowest pastoral country in the land of England, lower than the level of the sea, heavy with its precious relics as the sea bottom with its drowned ships. As he gazed at all this, feeling more and more friendly to Mr. Dekker and more and more hostile to Miss Drew, John began to say to himself that it was nothing else than this very low-lying character of the country that made it such a fatal receptacle for the superstitions of two thousand years! Into this blue-purple vapour, into the bosom of these fields lower than the sea, floated, drifted upon the wind, all those dangerous enervating myths that had taken the heart out of man's courage and self-reliance upon the earth. The True Faith indeed! Why, the land reeked with the honey lotus of all the superstitions of the world! Here they had come, here they had taken refuge, driven into flight by the great dragon-beaked ships and the long bright spears of his own heathen ancestry! And here, caught by these fatal low-lying flats they had lingered; lingered and clung till they grew rotten and miasmic, full of insidious mind-drugging poison. God! This place must be charged, “thick and slab,” with all the sweet-sickly religious lies that had ever medicined the world! Here like green scum over old stagnant water courses, here like green pond weeds upon castle moats, these tender-false mandragoras lulled to sleep the minds of the generations! No wonder Philip, with his accursed machines, found no manhood to resist his despotism in a place like this!

It was at this point in John Crow's contemplations that Marv and Sam came slowly back and reseated themselves by his side. They had exchanged only two sentences on the way back from the house. Mary had asked him whether they could spare Mr. Weatherwax, who worked in both their gardens, for the whole day tomorrow, and Sam had replied that he thought they could, as long as the old man “helped Penny to pump before he came across the road.”

John was soon made aware of the miserable depression into which Mary had fallen. Her profile troubled him by its tragic tenseness. He rose abruptly. “Good-bye, Miss Drew,” he said, bowing to her from where he stood. “Thank you so much for having asked me here. Good-bye, Sir, I hope you'll let me see you again. Cousin Mary, will you show me that short cut to Wir-ral Hill?”

He swept her off with him so boldly and decisively, actually taking her by the arm, that Miss Drew was nonplussed. “Don't desert me, Mary!” was all she could cry out after them. They skirted the kitchen garden and reached a little gate in a budding privet-hedge, where old Weatherwax in some wanton mood had planted hyacinths. There was a clump of these heavily fragrant flowers by this gate and a lark high up above them was quivering in the hot sky. Mary put her hand on the latch after giving him minute directions of the way. They could see the whole ridge of Wirral Hill in the distance and the girl knew she ought to leave him at once and return; but it was hard to do so. Mr. Owen Evans was expecting him, he explained, by a lonely tree up there; - and as he searched with his eyes the ridge she showed him, he could see clearly a particular tree which stood out in clear relief. He declared he could even see the Welshman's figure propped on the ground against this tree; but the girl contradicted this. “I know that black thing up there well,” she said. “I used to take it for a person. It's an old post. I went up there once to make sure.” “What tree is that? Evans said it was a thorn but it doesn't look like a thorn to me.”

“It's a sycamore.” she answered. “At least I think so. Oh, no I don't care what it is!” Her voice trembled. Her lips were quivering.

“What is it, my treasure?”

“What is it?” Her tears were swallowed in a sudden gust of anger. She dropped the latch of the little gate and her whole body stiffened. “You know what you've done, I suppose, John, by your silly talk? You've spoilt everything! She'll never ask you again. She'll stop my seeing you again! Oh, how could you do it, you fool? How could you do it?”

He was so astonished at the flashing eyes and the white face that his eyes and mouth opened with a blank, idiot look. His expression in fact was so exactly like one of those pictures of human beings that school-children draw on their slates, that Mary could not refrain from a faint smile.

“You see, John dear,” she said more gently, “it would be very hard for me to get another job. If Miss Drew gave me notice I'd be penniless. I'd have to be a governess or a companion with someone else. That would almost certainly mean my leaving Glastonbury. You don't expect to follow mq about all over England, do you, while I work in peoples' houses?”

“But I'm going to get work myself, Aere, and soon too,” he protested. "Evans knows lots of people. He's going to me.

He's going to take me this very afternoon to see his cousin, Mrs. Geard. Mrs. Geard and Mr. Evans are both Rhyses; if you know what that means! At any rate you know too well who the Geards are."

Mary did smile outright at that. She shook her head. “They call ditches about here by some funny name like that. No! Rhyne, that's it, not Rhys. But won't Philip be furious if you go and see those Geards?”

“I don't care a damn about Philip. I hate the fellow! I'll make this Geard chap give me work. He ought to do something for some of us. Any decent man would, after collaring all that. And Evans says he's all right.”

“But it would hurt Philip terribly, wouldn't it, and Aunt Elizabeth too, if you really did take money from that person? Does your friend know if this Geard man is going to go on living here?”

“Certainly he is! Mrs. Geard—who's a Rlns; and don't you forget that, Mary, for God knows all that that means!—has been three times already to look at a place over there”—he swung round on his heel and pointed to a sloping ridge not far from the Tor—“a place they call Chalice House. So they're going to stay here, don't 'ee fear. I tell you, my treasure, you needn't worry. It's going to be all right. We.'ll go on meeting in that same place in the Ruins where we did that first time. And as soon as I get work we'll be married—and the devil fly away with your old lady!”

Mary seized his wrist with all her fingers and lifted it to her mouth. “I've a great mind to punish you for behaving so badly,” she murmured. There was something about the smell of John's bony hand that made her homesick for Norfolk. “It smells like peat,” she thought, and she began licking with the tip of her tongue the little hairs which now tickled her lips. This gave her a sharp tingling sensation that ran through her whole frame. In a flash she imagined herself stretched out in bed by John's side. “Oh, my dear, oh, my dear!” she sighed.

“Take care, my treasure; they'll see us,” he whispered. “Wait till tomorrow afternoon! About half-past two, eh? When your old lady is asleep? I'll wait for you. So don't you get agitated; even if you can't get away for hours. I'll wait there till they close up the whole place! I'll walk about a bit, you know, and come back. It's dry in that little chapel, even if it's raining outside.”

Thus they talked by the gate, unwilling to separate, hugging each other—though they were not actually touching each other now—as tightly as if they were stark naked, but with no wild, irresistible rush of passion. They were Norfolk Crows, Crows from Norwich, from Thorpe, from Yaxham, from Thetford, from East Dereham, from Cringleford, from Methwold. Their love was lust, a healthy, earthy, muddy, weather-washed lust, like the love of water-rats in Alder Dyke or the love of badgers on Brandon Heath. They were shamelessly devoid of any Ideal Love. Born to belong to each other, by the same primordial law that made the Egyptian Ptolemies marry their sisters, they accepted their fatal monogamy as if it were the most casual of sensual attractions.

And in the etheric atmosphere about those two, as they stood there, quivered the immemorial Mystery of Glastonbury. Christians had one name for this Power, the ancient heathen inhabitants of this place had another, and a quite different one. Everyone who came to this spot seemed to draw something from it, attracted by a magnetism too powerful for anyone to resist, but as different people approached it they changed its chemistry, though not its essence, by their own identity, so that upon none of them it had the same psychic effect. This influence was personal and yet impersonal, it was a material centre of force and yet an immaterial fountain of life. It had its own sui generis origin in the nature of the Good-Evil First Cause, but it had grown to be more and more an independent entity as the centuries rolled over it. This had doubtless come about by reason of the creative energies pouring into it from the various cults, which, consciously or unconsciously, sucked their life-blood from its wind-blown, gossamer-light vortex. Older than Christianity, older than the Druids, older than the gods of Norsemen or Romans, older than the gods of the neolithic men, this many-named Mystery had been handed down to subsequent generations by three psychic channels; by the channel of popular renown, by the channel of inspired poetry, and by the channel of individual experience.

Names are magical powers. Names can work miracles. But the traditional name of this entity—the Holy Grail—might easily mislead an intelligent historian of our planet. The reality is one thing; the name, with all its strange associations, is only an outward shell of such reality. Apart from the fabulous stories that have become the burden of this wind-blown “Numen” it must be noted that as these two figures—this man and this woman— longed to make love to each other but were withheld by circumstance, their intense desire—all the more electric for being as vicious as it was—was urged by its own intensity (apart altogether from any consciousness in these two as to what was happening) to the very brink of this floating Fount of Life. The strongest of all psychic forces in the world is unsatisfied desire. And the desire of these two at this moment, gathering electric force out of the atomic air and striving blindly towards each other in despite of the sundering flesh, was so caught up and so heightened by the frustrated desires of two thousand years, which in that valley had pulsed and jetted and spouted, that it did actually draw near to that Secret Thing. Thus the loves of these two people, both of them hostile to all these miraculous forces, both of them rooted in fen-mud and vicious heathenism, did, by reason of the strength of what the old Benedictines would have called their “brutish and carnal purpose,5'' approach the invisible rim of that wind-blown mystery. Approach it, hut not touch it! With a heavy heart Mary dragged herself off. Three times she looked back and waved her hand, watching him make his lingering way towards Wirral Hill. Southwest he went; and, each time she turned, the afternoon sun seemed more obscuring, more vaporously concealing, more hopelessly swallowing! He seemed to disappear into that golden haze like ”the knight-at-arrns“ of the poet, ”alone and palely loitering.“ But darkly, not ”palely," did his figure pass away, vanishing amid the yet darker forms of tree trunks and wall cornices and wooden water butts and clothes lines and garden pumps; all mingling together in dim, fantastic, purplish dream stuff; as if the slanting sun-rays had hollowed out all substance, all solidity, from both them and him!

As, hot and perspiring, John toiled up that dusty ascent, he saw the boyish countenance of Tom Barter before him. He was going to see Tom Barter tomorrow evening. Would he prove a complete stranger when he was face to face with him? Tomorrow evening was Saturday. He hoped Mary would be able to reach that place in the Ruins in good time. Well! if she were late, he would have to keep Tom waiting. But Tom would not mind. Tom was always good-natured. Tom never got angry. No, he never got angry, even when the boat was stranded in the mud, even when the bait was left behind, even when a float was lost, even when an oar got adrift, even when you kept him waiting for hours!

By God! it was with Tom, and not with Mary, that he had played that wicked game, that day, at the bottom of the boat* How extraordinary that he should have mixed up those two like that in his mind!

It was a steep and a dusty path he was following up the slope of Wirral Hill. Oh, how he longed for the stormy north wind and the wide fens. His nostalgia for Norfolk became a shrinking back from the strangeness of Glastonbury! He found himself staring at an iron seat which the municipality of the town had placed on a ledge of that long ascent. His sensations were very queer as he stood staring at this iron seat. “When I am having exciting thoughts about making love to Mary,” he said to himself, “I feel careless and reckless; but when I think of Tom I have such a sensation of being protected that it makes me frightened of everything! God! I wish Mary and Tom and I were all safe back in that Northwold drawing-room, looking out on that lawn! There's something funny about this place. This place seems to be unreal. I feel exactly as if it were floating on a sea of coloured glass. I feel as if at any moment it might sink and carry me down into God knows what!”

He really did begin, at that moment, to feel physically dizzy. This alarmed him and made him tighten his hold on the handle of his stick and hurry on up the hill. He soon perceived beyond the curve of the incline, lifted above the dust of the pathway in front of him, the gaunt, outstretched branch of the ambiguous tree. And there was the black post; and there, with his back propped against the post and his chin upon his knees, sat Mr. Owen Evans. The sight of Mr. Evans, seated in that manner, brought back, in a flash, to John's mind, the image of Stone-henge. “Ha! those stones are older than Glastonbury!” he muttered to himself. And then feeling his courage and his adventur-ousness returning to him, “0 great Stone Circle,” he prayed, “give me my girl into my hands in spite of all these kings and saints and thorn trees!”