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He paused and looked round to make sure that his wife had not slipped away and retreated into the house. No; Nell Zoyland was standing exactly where she had been when he began to speak, her hands pressed against the back of an empty chair. It was then that Will Zoyland's eye, as he looked round, caught sight of a kestrel-hawk hovering in the air above some pollarded willows. He clapped his great hand on his mouth with an inarticulate shishing sound.

“Shish! Shish!” he murmured, glancing at the two Dekkers and then at Nell. He rose to his feet, turned his back upon them all, and stepping lightly on tip-toe, like a gamekeeper in pursuit of a poacher, hurried to the side wall of his house.

Following his motions with his eyes, the elder Dekker remembered now, what everybody in Glastonbury knew, namely that Mr. Zoyland was the bastard son of the Marquis of P., the great Somersetshire landowner. He saw the fellow seize upon his gun, where it lay propped against the wall, and glance quickly upward. Like the dedicated naturalist that he was, Mat Dekker haLed to see any bird shot; and even though he had been told that in that low-lying ground, kestrels had grown to be a nuisance, he still would have protested violently.

Without a second's hesitation he lifted up his voice from where he sat and uttered a resounding, “Hoy! a-hoy! hawk-a-hoy!”

The report of the gun followed almost immediately; but, startled by his guest's shout, the bearded bastard of Lord P. missed his bird.

Nell fully expected the roar of a Polyphemus to follow this mischance and a terrible, “Damn your soul, Sir! What do you mean by that?” But neither Mr. Zoyland's voice nor any look in his eyes betrayed a flicker of such emotion.

''Sorry, Sir!“ was all he said, as he resumed his seat with his gun across his knees; ”I ought to have remembered your penchant for hawks. Sam told me how he used to keep a pair of them when he was at school. I expect it was by taming hawks that he learnt to tame girls. Well, Sam; well, Nell, what are you two romantic children going to decide? Is poor old Will to go on sleeping alone?"

There was something about the man's tone that roused the girl to a level of emotion and a quality of emotion that astonished her lover.

The slow-flowing water beneath them seemed to have taken to itself all the daylight that was left; and between the girl's tense face and its unruffled surface an affinity of whiteness that was almost phosphorescent rose into being, established itself, and became more and more dominant. Had the little house, the pollarded willows, the gun on the bearded man's knees, the twitching chin of Sam, been elements of sound in a momentous orchestra, this whiteness of flowing water and of a woman's face would have been the flute note or the oboe note in the symphonic effect.

Here sat together, on the darkening bank of this steel-white water, three formidable men, any one of whom could have crushed out that frail spark of girlish life as the swish of a horse's tail might crush a currant moth. And yet the tension of that single feminine heart reduced all three of them to the neg-ligibleness of three wooden posts in the palings around an agitated heifer.

And just as such a heifer's up-tossed head and lifted voice might bring some farm girl upon the scene who would pass those paling-posts by as if they did not exist, so the suppressed tempest in Nell Zoyland's nerves brought to her rescue nothing less than the great planet of the evening itself. Whiter than the White-lake stream, whiter even than the girl's face, this celestial luminary, this immortal sign in the heavens “that brings the traveller home by every road,” emerged now from the cloudy western lake wherein the sun had vanished.

A long relaxed shiver of nervous relief passed through Nell Zoyland's perfect breasts, and through her ravished but uncon-ceiving womb, and through her thighs and through her trembling knees. Turning her gaze from the evening star she looked, for some reason she could never have explained, not into Sam's pathetic bear-eyes that were following her every motion, but into two deep, twilit, granite pools. Into such granite pools—now that his enemy, the Sun, had long since vanished—Mat Dekker's quiet grey eyes, under their bristling eyebrows, had been transformed! The man met the girl's gaze; and the mysterious sweetness of her soul—troubled still but no longer convulsed with anger—rested for a second upon the priest's new strength, as if he and not her lover or her husband were her true friend among those three men.

“Well, you two,” repeated Will Zoyland, "aren't you going to answer? I am one for living a civilised life in these things. Could any man make a more liberal offer? If Nell will live again with me, as she did when we were married a couple of years ago, I'll let her see as much of our good Sam as she likes. Will's bed isn't the only place where young blood can cool itself. There's my offer. If you two want to go off together and leave Will to look after himself, go! For God's sake, go! And good luck to you! I can't hand you the money for expenses, because I haven't got it. She knows—none so well as she!—that I haven't got it. But if you go I won't trouble ye. I won't lift a finger to stay ye. Only I won't take Nell back if she gets sick of it. 'Once gone, always gone' is my motto for runaway little girls.

“Well, Sir,”—and he turned quite definitely to Mr. Dekker now, bowing towards him over his gun—“do you feel like treating these frisky lambs to a trip abroad? Or are you prepared to let 'em kiss and clip under our own roofs?”

Mat Dekker rose slowly to his feet.

“May I be allowed a few words alone with Mrs. Zoyland before we talk any more about this?”

The bearded man looked, for one quarter of a second, a little nonplussed; but he quickly recovered himself and waved his hand towards the house.

“You go in with him, Nell, if you want to! Can you light the sitting-room lamp or do you want me to come and do it? You can? Very well, then! Sam and I will stay out-of-doors. Come and see my otter trap, Sam! It's more likely to catch a water-rat than an otter in this little puddle; but you never can tell. Queer if there should be an otter in it tonight—of all nights— but I don't suppose there is.”

The man went so far in his blustering bonhomie as actually to take Sam by the arm. Sam was so dazed by all these events that he offered no resistance. His mind seemed to have become incapable of any thought or any decision. What wavered before him just then was the gasping mouth of the sick minnow, at the top of the water in the aquarium, in their play-room. He felt like that minnow himself!

“You know, Sam, the truth is, since we've broken the ice”— Zoyland's voice went booming on in the darkness by the lad's side like a low-toned threshing machine—“our little Nell's not so much in love with you as she's in love with Love. She's as romantic as a child of sixteen. In fact mentally, I often think, she is sixteen. That's what it is, Sammy, old friend, mentally sixteen ; and with no more idea of the realities of life than a schoolgirl. It's a good thing it was a boy like you who came along. With anyone else she'd have made herself seriously unhappy; but with you she's safe. That's what I've said to her from the beginning. 'You'll never make me angry with you over Sam Dekker,' I've said. 'With that boy you're safe,' I've said. And you are safe, aren't you, Sam?”

He pressed the lad's arm with his free hand as he led him along the bank of the stream. Sam at least had the wit to notice that in his other hand he still held his gun. By degrees Sam became conscious too that he did have one clear and strong wish in his confused brain. He wished that William Zoyland did not live where it was possible for him to trap otters.

4JMy father doesn't like the idea of trapping otters," he remarked.

After following a kind of tow-path along the bank they came to a small river weir. There was a gurgling sound under the woodwork here, and a low humming and rustling sound; both sounds were evidently being caused by the position of the dam at that hour, but it was too dark to distinguish them exactly.

Out of the darkness of that full-brimmed swishing water there emerged a damp, chilly, but not unpleasant smell, composed of many separate elements. It was composed of wet moss, of old dead leaves, of yet older dead wood, of long submerged, slime-coated masonry, of clammy river weeds. The gurgling sound and the rushing sound came forth hollowly together, producing upon the ear a kindred effect to that produced upon the sense of smell by the damp wafture.

The idea of a wild otter caught in a trap by his bearded companion suddenly became unbearable to Sam Dekker. For the first time in his life this much-enduring youth found himself trembling from head to foot with a desire to kill. He imaged to himself the precise nature of the sudden, violent shove which would precipitate this burly offspring of the Marquis of P. into the rushing blackness.

“There may be one of them in it, you know. There may be one of them in it,” William Zoyland kept obstinately repeating. Probably nothing would have happened. Probably some other excuse would have presented itself for refraining from a piece of silly violence that might not even have proved fatal, for it is likely enough that Zoyland was a powerful swimmer. But the excuse he did obey was the hoot of an owl coming from the direction of the cottage, and two or three times repeated. Sam answered the owl's cry, imitating it exactly, and the thing was repeated again and again. $

“He wants us back at your house,” Sam said. “So we'd better go. That's my father; that's not an owl.”

“One minute, then—you go ahead, Sam! I'll be with you in a moment.”

But Sam had not waited for this permission from his host and rival. He was already hurrying back with a shambling speed that nearly broke into a run. He felt he was escaping, not from the bearded man but from his own dark impulse. He was surprised to hear strange voices when he aeared the house and as he reached it he observed, in the narrow lane behind it, the lights of a motor car. When he entered the little sitting-room, he found it pleasantly illuminated by the large green-shaded lamp to which his host had recently referred; and there were red coals in the grate.

Talking eagerly to his father and Nell, and all of them standing in an animated group in the centre of the room, were Mr. Philip Crow and Mr. Tom Barter. Sam shook hands awkwardly and mechanically with the newcomers but all his attention was concentrated upon Nell. Ever since the moment when some mysterious vibration had passed between the girl and that white planet in the western sky, NelFs mood had completely changed. The nervous tension that had been growing week by week ever since she refused Will Zoyland his nightly embraces, seemed, at any rate for the present, to have fallen away. In some remote place in her heart, in some hidden chamber there, not far from the spot where she had just now been so grievously wounded by his words, she was, as a matter of fact, experiencing a reaction in his favour. The realisation that she could leave him, if only Sam would risk all, satisfied her inordinate mania for romance, while the fact that it was clear that Sam never would risk all helped her reaction towards her husband. Like Helen of Troy, upon the high tower of the wall, she permitted Aphrodite to be her guide. And the harlot goddess persuaded her to keep both her man and her lover!

In Sam's simple brain it had been lodged as a ghastly and tragic fact that Zoyland's love-making was odious to her. She had been subtly and gradually impelled to lead him on to this sinister view. And she had done it half-unconsciously; never exactly lying to him; half-believing the fancy herself, as she yielded to his pathetic and inexperienced advances. Men, especially young men, because of something fastidious and idealistic in their own nature, are always prepared to be touched to the heart by the idea of a girl's physical loathing for another man. Indeed it is given to few men, whether old or young, to understand the profound part played by what might be called “the universal prostitute” in every woman's nature. It is indeed always a puzzle to men, the physical passivity which women have the power of summoning up, to endure the inconvenience of an amorous excitement which they do not share. Few men realize the depth of the satisfaction to women's nature in the mere possession of the power to cause such excitement. When a man sees a sensitive girl with what he considers a thick-skinned, brutal mate, he experiences a twinge—perhaps quite uncalled-for—of the sort of imaginative pity which is the inverse side of male sadism.

Whatever passivity it was that Nell Zoyland gave herself up to now, it had something about it of that mysterious passivity of fate which the women of antiquity knew. And doubtless this mood had been fortified in this case by the girl's talk with Sam's father. Mat Dekker had risen to the occasion with a weight and an insight that surprised even himself. To beg her to postpone, to delay, to think, had been his intention when he spoke to Nell; but below his grave and practical words there had been such a clairvoyant tenderness, such a direct man-to-woman, as well as priest-to-daughter vibration in his tone, that her nervous revolt against her dilemma mounting up to such a pitch of blind anger, and then soothed by the Planet of Love, ebbed altogether under his influence.

“What I really came for,” Philip Crow was saying, “was to see whether there was a chance of Mr. Zoyland's helping me out, over at Wookey Hole, as he did last year when I was in difficulties. I know of course”—this was said with a little stiff bow in Nell's direction—“that the remuneration is nothing to him. But the work is interesting—he found it so last Spring—and I'm prepared to pay him a little more this time.”

“You mean you want Zoyland to act as official guide in Wookey Hole?” threw in Mat Dekker. “By Heaven, Crow, if Zoyland won't do it for you, I believe my Sam here would be just the person! He's read everything there is to be read on Wookey, and he's better up on neolithic weapons than anyone round here. You'd help Mr. Crow, wouldn't you, Sam, if Zoyland refused?”

Sam, abashed by his father's words, threw a humble glance like that of a bewildered horse in the direction of Nell but uttered no sound at all.

“William may be pleased to do it,” the girl said hurriedly, speaking to Philip but replying to Sam's look. “But I think Sam would be just as good a guide in those caves—perhaps better. William's inclined to be flippant and off-handed with people when he doesn't like them and there must be lots of very teasing people who come to visit Wookey.”