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“Emma says,” went on Louie, whose character it was to give the practical details of life their due proportion, leaving to the more pensive and more romantic Lily the psychological aura of the events under discussion, “that Mr. Crow made certain he was going to have all Canon Crow's money; and that he's been spending more than he could afford on Wookey Hole alone.”

“He likes electrifying things,” murmured Lily dreamily. “They tell about the Wookey Hole witch up in Wells. Do you remember, Louie, wThat that woman said when we were out there on choir-treat day, how that she'd once been down there, where those stalagmites and stalactites grow, and that she ran out in hysterics, thinking she saw the witch?”

“It's this flying he's started on now,” went on Louie, holding the topic resolutely down to facts, “that's the main trouble. Of course on the top of his well-known electric schemes it does mean a very considerable expenditure.”

As she uttered this judicial remark Louie crossed her knees, as if her neat shoes were resting upon an embroidered footstool instead of upon Number One's brick floor, and folding her gloved hands over her knees she began rubbing her right hard very slowly over her left hand.

It must have been with this precise gesture, with these exact words, and with this identical intonation combined with a frowning glance given to some remote object—in the present case, alas! to nothing more dignified than Number One's swill-pail, turned upside down—that Miss Euphemia Drew had received the town gossip about Philip Crow's financial state.

“Who was that wild-looking child you had here just now, Uncle?” enquired Louie, dropping her Miss Drew airs.

“Eh? Who? Which on 'em do you mean?” muttered the old man with startled embarrassment. He had been secretly hoping that no more would be said about his previous visitors.

“The thin little girl, with great black eyes, and her hair all uncombed, and her clothes so dirty.”

“As far as I knows that be Nelly,” replied Abel Twig.

“But Nelly what, Uncle?” insisted Louie. "She must have a surname/'

“I talked to my friend Jones in hospital about Nelly,” confessed the old man reluctantly. “I told him all about she, and how she went round with Jackie Jones and Sis Cole; and he did say that her mother's name was Morgan. So I suppose—though, mind ye, I baint sure—that her name be similarwise.” He was silent and then muttered under his breath, “Morgan, Nelly Morgan, Eleanor Morgan,” as if he were wondering how to give to these syllables some special rhythmic secret. At the name “Morgan” he was surprised to notice the two sisters exchanging a swift, significant glance. Louie actually nodded at Lily, as who should say, “You see! That's just what would happen, that that child, of all children, should be picked up by Uncle!”

Full of greater fear than ever, after he had caught this interchange of glances, that by continuing the topic he should bring harm in some way upon his little friend, Number One hurriedly went on.

“I expect Nelly's name isn't Morgan at all. No . . . no. When I come to think of it, Number—I mean my friend Jones—was sure it wasn't! Jackie calls she Nelly. Sis calls she Nelly. There be many well-thought-on women in the world what have only one name.” Number One racked his brains to think of some of these famous monosyllabic females. At last his face lit up. He recalled his grand-dad's Lake Village. “The Lady of the Lake,” he cried triumphantly, “had only------” He stopped in dismay; for there came into his head a conversation with old Mr. Merry, the Curator of the Glastonbury Museum, from whom he had sought to get information about his grandfather's historic field. This authority had told him that the real Lady of the Lake was none other than Morgan Le Fay, the very ambiguous sister of King Arthur!

“It's Nelly Morgan that was here with Jackie Jones and Sis Cole,” said Louie with decision. “You've let your kind heart run awsy with you again, Uncle. It's lucky no one but Lily and me knows about this. But we've told you now and you do know, so you can act according.”

“What be talking about, me pretty?” stammered Uncle Abel.

Lily meanwhile had assumed a sad, poetic expression. “What he feels, 'tis strange to think,” she interrupted dreamily, "as he lies pondering on a poor betrayed girl, and on a little child who belongs to him and yet doesn't belong to him.'5

“Stuff and nonsense!” cried Louie. “All he thinks about is electricity and flying machines and asking Mayor Wollop to drop in to dinner. He doesn't think of anyone's feelings.”

“Will it be best to tell Emma about that child being with Jackie and Sis; and about her having been in Uncle's house?” Lily put into this question as much dramatic gravity as if she were taking a personal part in some great cause celebre.

Louie knitted her brows in solemn consideration.

“It will be wisest,” she replied, in the very manner of Eu-phemia Drew, “to leave what we say till we see how things arrange themselves. I would not like to upset Emma; and it might make it harder for Emma too, if she knew what Mrs. Crow didnt know.”

Number One could stand all this no longer. His awe of his nieces broke down completely under the pressure of his mental bewilderment. He rose up from his chair. “What the holy terror,'* he cried, ”are you gals gabbling about?"

Lily's expression was a masterpiece of refined protest, sentimental relish for the whole situation, and an irresistible desire to be the one permitted to tell him ail-But she was not that one; for that one was Louie.

“Don't get agitated, you poor darling, and do please sit down. It's all very dreadful”—the intonation of Miss Drew was mingled here with a vague mimicry of certain lady-visitors—“hut we must be as collected and sensible as we can. The truth is that Emma has found out a very unhappy story. It appears”—here Louie took breath and fidgetted in a modest manner with her ribbon— “that Mr. Crow misconducted himself some eight years ago with Jenny Morgan. Jenny seems to have forgotten herself completely and the result was that she had a baby.”

The style in which Louie delivered herself of this grand climax was, it is needless to point out, entirely her own. No one but Louie would have used that derogatory and indeed disagreeable word “misconducted.” No one but Louie would have used the expression “forgot herself” for the normal lapse from the virginal state.

“Jenny has taken to drink/' Louie went on, ”since then, but she works for the child. She couldn't bring herself to dispose of the child. She used to hear such terrible things of those institutions. Emma thinks he sends her a little money every second Wednesday. Emma knows he always goes to the Post Office on that day. That's what Emma thinks, mind you,—that he sends her a little regularly. Emma doesn't know for certain whether he does or not, but she is almost sure he does."

Number One's countenance had begun to beam with relief and satisfaction. He had feared he knew not what; and now to learn that all this agitation was only about Nelly's illegitimacy completely reassured him.

“Nelly Morgan,” he repeated cheerfully. And then, thinking of the Curator's words, “Morgan Nelly,” he added.

“Mr. Crow isn't altogether a wicked man,” threw in Lily. “He is a strange man though. I believe he lives a wild life unknown to the world.” Her voice sank and ceased. She looked away into the distance, far away beyond the pollarded willows. A skilful observer might have read in her face that she felt that shame and even desertion would not have been without their own melancholy compensations if it had been her lot, in place of Jenny Morgan, to “forget herself” with so Byronic a seducer as Philip Crow.

Number One, who had quite recovered his spirits since he had learned that his elegant nieces had nothing against Jackie's lieutenant except her birth, suggested now that before they left Back-wear Hut they should see his “garden.”

In pursuance of this design he led the way through his back door, past the post to which Betsy was tethered, till he reached a little square plot surrounded by a low, whitewashed fence. Here were several rows of young peas and scarlet-runners and one row of freshly sprouting celery. But at the corner of the garden—a reserved space of about a square yard—waved in the warm air a fragrant patch of pheasant-eyed narcissus. Number One clicked open a little toy gate into his garden and stepping carefully over the young vegetables picked with reckless impetuosity at least half of these lotus-scented flowers. These he divided into two bouquets of exactly the same size; and when, after a few affectionate good-byes—for Louie and Lily felt very protective to their only male relation—the girls went off, up Godney Road to where it joined Wells Road, these white flowers, pinned on their black dresses and matching most felicitously their black and white Easter hats, gave them a really charming appearance.

It must have been about an hour later that the discreet Emma was serving tea in her immaculate kitchen to these pretty wearers of Abel Twig's nosegays. Emma was also dressed in black but over her dress she wore a spotless white apron and upon her head, the most carefully brushed and tidied head in Glastonbury she wore an old-fashioned cap trimmed with handmade lace.

Emma, unlike her visitors, had never made any attempt to copy her mistress' manners or speech. Emma's manners were dignified, but they were those of one, who as she always expressed it, “knew her place,” and her speech was as local as a Mendip quarry. She was the kind of servant who in place of losing herself in her employer's fortunes or way of life made of those things the background for her own resolute character. The character of Emma was not eccentric like that of Penny Pitches. Emma detested eccentricity. She was no worshipper of the aristocracy either, like Red Robinson's mother. What she really was was a strict Professional; and her Profession was that of the Perfect Servant. In Tilly Crow she had found what she considered to be the Perfect Mistress. Mrs. Philip's deplorable limitations, obvious to all the rest of the world, were not limitations at all to Emma. They were virtues high and rare; and for the sake of these virtues she was as devoted to this neurotic and shrewish recluse as any old-fashioned lawyer's clerk was ever devoted to a narrow-minded, pettifogging scrivener.

In this great turbulent universe, wherein ships at sea, certain farms on land, certain soldiers' camps, certain outposts of civilisation, conducted under scrupulous authority, become oases of order in the midst of chaos, the miniature polity entitled The Elms, ruled over by Emma and Tilly Crow, was in its own way almost without rival. The kitchen tea-party which was now proceeding would have been as much disturbed by the presence of any of the “gentry” who were contemporaneously taking tea ir. Tilly's drawing-room as any of Tilly's guests would have been had Emma, in place of answering the bell, sat down on the sofa beside her mistress. But the domestic ritual in the drawing-room under the rule of Mrs. Philip was no less punctilious than the ritual in Mrs. Philip's kitchen under the rule of Emma; and between these two women, on this nice professional point, there was a uniformity of opinion too deep to be expressed in words. Their mutual ideal was, as a matter of fact, as different from the aristocratic way of taking things as it was different from the proletarian way, or from the easy-going, lower-middle-class way of Mr. and Mrs. Geard. It was upper-middle-class. And not for nothing does one note that it has been from houses conducted under the Emmas and the Tillys of life that such characteristically English characters as Charles Darwin and Horatio Nelson have projected their world-shaping opinions and their heroic deeds. Indeed it might with justice be said that two oases of perfect order and peace, and two alone, existed in Glastonbury at that epoch—the draper's shop of Mr. Wollop, the Mayor, and the home of Tilly Crow! Outside these harbours of tenoned and mortised security everything ebbed and flowed. These were, so to speak, the Parmenidean rafts of stillness in the Heraclitean flux of Glastonbury life.

The lights had been lit in both drawing-room and kitchen before the visitors departed. In other houses they would not have been lit! In other houses people would have been too absorbed in talk, too enamoured of the twdlight, to have sent for lamps and candles, or thought of closing shutters, drawing curtains, pulling down blinds! This closing out of the twilight was indeed a characteristic Norfolk habit. The great green curtains in Northwold Rectory were always drawn close, had been drawn close for years, when twilight began. So no doubt had the old Vikings, when they landed at Wick, gathered round their bivouac fires and turned their backs to the ghostly Druidic light lingering in the west! This closing of the shutters at The Elms was in fact a Norse custorn. All the West-Country servants hated it, except Emma, whose own people in their high Mendip farms, had practised the same habit.

Tilly Crow's guests were William Zoyland, who tonight was to be transported to Wookey Hole in Mr. Barter's airplane, and Dave and Persephone Spear, who had arrived that morning from Bristol and had taken lodgings in High Street.

William Zoyland rather enjoyed the thought of a couple of months' showmanship in Wookey Hole. A descendant of a long line of attendants upon kings, there was nothing unpleasant or undignified to Will in the office of lord chamberlain to a subterranean river. Yet another cause of the delicious feeling of well-being that flowed through him at this moment was the frank and shameless delight he took in the society of the dark-haired girl now occupied in amusing their hostess. The man he was talking to was Nell's half-brother; so he had every justification in treating the husband as cavalierly and the wife as gallantly as ho pleased. There was indeed something piquant about keeping up a conservative argument with a passionate enemy of society while at the same time he played the courtier with his opponent's lady. The more deeply he got entangled in argument with Dave the more frankly unashamed were the glances of admiration which he bestowed upon Persephone. He experienced at this moment a feeling as if, with that firelight warming his great limbs and the boyish hips of this curly-haired girl warming his proud soul, there was nothing in heaven or hell he wouldn't enjoy facing! If this cropped skull and patient eyes opposite him were to condemn him to the guillotine at dawn as a cumberer of the earth—he'd still be happy. If this enchanting girl would slip into his bedroom tonight, undress before his eyes, and be off before he touched her—he'd still be happy. If he knew he were to be compelled that very evening to eat a basketful of otter's dung while Sam Dekker embraced Nell before his eyes and they both mocked at him—he'd still be happy.