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“Relatives arrived for the funeral, I reckon? 'Tis as we all knew 'twould be. Canon were left lonesome enough when he were alive; but anyone would think the man were a Member o' Parliament now he be dead. Never have I see'd so many folk turn into them gates. Old Ben Pod at the lodge, who counts every wheel that passes—'tis his only joy since he lost the use of his legs— must have broke his 'rithmetic in counting them.”

“There won't be so many to count when we be put under sod,” remarked one of the other men. “ 'Tis because there's been Crows in England since King Canute.”

“Since when?” cried the other. “There's been Crows in England since earlier than him. He be in History, he be; and this here family goes further back than History. Talking of families,” he went on, “I hope your lady won't mind my saying so but it's singular how old customs abide in certain breeds. I don't know how near related to the Canon ye two bef but every man's child bom in this place knows one thing about this family.” He lowered his voice as he spoke. “There's not one of ye Crows when 'a conies to die, that has a son left to bury 'un. They be all sons' sons that lay 'un in ground. There must be Scripture for't; though why it should be as 'tis is beyond my conjecture. Some man of old time, amidst 'en, must have done summat turble . . . eaten his own offspring like enough, in want of kindlier meat . . . summat o' that , . . and ever since such doings they all outlive their sons. 'Tis a kind of Divine Dispensation, I reckon.”

John and Mary, who had felt it impolite to desert the threshold where they had been arrested by this discourse, were now enabled to make their escape. For one second the phrase “Geard of Glas-tonbury” returned upon John's mind; but it was gone as quickly as it came.

“To the Mill, to the Mill!” he cried excitedly, and the two cousins hurried eastward against the sharp wind down the narrow, straight lane.

Harrod's Mill was approached, by its own drive, through a couple of open fields. They entered this drive through a gate leading out of the road to Didlington, just before the bridge over the River Wissey.

The wind was sharp indeed as they crossed these two big meadows; but there was a faint fragrance of sap-filled grass in the air and the sun was hot. Mary's ecstasy of mood increased rather than diminished as she walked by John's side, following his step with her step and even picking up a stick from the ground as she went along. This she did with the conscious desire to have some sensation of her own exactly parallel to that which her cousin enjoyed as he pressed the end of his stick into the ground. Mary felt that everything she looked at was bathed in a liquid mist and yet was seen by her for the first time in its real essence. It seemed to her that the souls of all living things flung forth their inmost nature that day in a magical rapture. All things seemed anxious to let all other living things realise how they loved them. As for herself she felt she could have stroked with her bare fingers everything she looked at. The very wind, so keen, so bitter, that now blew in her face and tugged at her clothes; even towards it she felt a sort of tenderness! She seemed to divine that it felt itself to be hated by all the human beings it encountered; and she longed to disabuse it of this mistake.

At one moment she caught sight of a patch of small plants in the grass of the field whose leaves seemed to have a glossy texture and a greenish-whitish look that was familiar to her. “Aren't those cowslips over there?” They both hurried to the spot. Yes, they were cowslips; but so early or so stunted were they that the tiny buds were barely yellow. John was immensely relieved that she did not incontinently snatch at these pale, rudimentary, brittle stalks, covered with tiny white hairs, like the forearms of young girls, and hand them to him or keep them in her dress as memorials of this hour. How often in country excursions with his French friends, had he been railed at by them as a prig, a poseur, un fou Anglais for his diseased conscience in refusing to pick flowers.

Before reaching Harrod's Mill-pond they came upon an“ old cow-shed, once black with tar, but now blotched with queer patches of a minutely growing moss, which in some places” was green and in others the colour of rusty iron. Against the western side of this shed the grass was twice as tall as in the rest of the field and of a much more vivid green. The cousins surveyed this erection in silence for a moment, he leaning on his hazel-stick which was smooth to his hand, she leaning on the rotten bramble-stick she had picked up which was rough to her hand. Their hesitation was so humorously identical, that when they glanced at each other they smiled broadly, their white strong teeth gleaming in the sun.

“Oh, to the devil with it!” he cried. “It'll get up again as soon as we've got up. It does from under the cows and we're lighter than cows. Come on, Mary—let's have our feast!”

He clutched at her skirt from his seated position and almost pulled her off her balance. She slipped down, however, facing him, her legs drawn up under her, and at once began untying the parcel of bread and cheese, holding it carefully on her lap. High above their heads several larks seemed bursting their little bodies with their shrill canticle. Their song was stoical and continuous, with a kind of harshness in its quivering rapture. “Hark at the larks!” said John to Mary, watching the careful way she was dividing their viands. As a distributor of the bread and cheese both the woman in her and the young girl played their part. She made sandwiches for John and herself as if the two of them had stood back to back measuring their difference in size. He meanwhile pulled out the cork of the flask and held it out to her for her to take the first drink. Preoccupied with the sandwiches, she let him hold it till his weary wrist rested upon her knee. But as soon as she had put it to her lips he jumped to his feet again, murmured some kind of abracadabra and poured out what he told her was a libation to the gods.

When they had finished all there was of both food and drink, he produced a packet of Gold Flake cigarettes, and they smoked for a while, contented and at rest. But the larks had come down. The cold wind rendered their exultation intermittent.

“Those men were perfectly right,” said John. “It has become almost absurd, the way, from generation to generation of our family the older generation outlives the younger. When you come to think of it it's quite unnatural that four cousins, Philip, you, myself, and Persephone should all be grown-up orphans; and the only child of Grandfather's alive should be Aunt Elizabeth. And I'll tell you another thing that's queer too; not one of our parents is buried in the churchyard! How do you suppose that happened, Mary?”

“How do you know they're not buried there, Cousin John, when you've lived all your life in France?”

“Oh, I've watched the family, Mary! Don't you make any mistake. I've watched them like a hawk. I know exactly how much money Grandfather's got. I know where every one of the uncles and aunts died and where they were buried. I could write a history of the Crows of Norfolk, I tell you, like Ranke's history of the Popes.”

“They've never been very much,” murmured Mary dreamily, changing her position and stretching herself out on the grass. “You're sitting on your coat, aren't you?”

“Yeomen, I fancy, for about five hundred years,” said John.

She lifted up her head to smile at him.

“I've never thought much of yeomen.” Her next words came with a drowsy, luxurious querulousness as she let her head sink down again. “T wish he had been buried yesterday.”

They were both silent for a couple of minutes. Then she pushed herself with her hands a little nearer him and took ofif her hat, flinging it on the grass a few paces off.

“I like your hair, Mary,” he said, boldly twisting a wisp of it back from her forehead, round a couple of his fingers. “It's the nicest hair I've ever touched. It's just the right tinge of brown. I say, it's awfully full of electricity!”

“I expect you're a great authority,” she said. Her remark was made as if it were simply a grave statement, free from all irony, and she went on in the same tone. "How many girls have you made love to, John, in your whole life?'

As she spoke she propped herself up a little and this time let her shoulders rest against his knees.

“God! My dear,” he muttered, “do you think I count them? I'm not Ben Pod.”

“Fve never been made love to in my life,” said Mary. “So I don't know what it's like. Does a girl get as much pleasure out of it as a man, John, do you think?”

“That's the oldest question, Mary, ever asked of any oracle. In fact it was first asked by the gods themselves.”

“Tell me about it,” said Mary. “I feel just as I did, asking you such questions when we went in the boat”

“They asked the greatest of all soothsayers,” John informed her. “The old Teiresias; and do you know what he said? He said that in the act of love it was the woman who enjoyed it most.” All the while he was speaking, he was indulging in a delicious feeling of pleasure because she had remembered the boat.

“I expect he was right,” commented Mary gravely; and then, after a pause, “I think he was right,” she concluded.

“The Queen of Heaven must have known he was right,” said John, “for she was so angry that she turned him into a woman. Does it strike youjhat was a queer punishment?”

She fixed her brown eyes upon him. “Not at all, Cousin John. It seems a very natural punishment.”

From a meadow remote from where they were and at present concealed by the shed there came to them at that minute the wild familiar cry of the lapwing.

“I've been wanting all the time to ask you, Mary,” he recommenced, “whether you remember that day we couldn't get the boat past the dam—the dam between the big river and the little river? You said just now that you'd never been made love to. Why! my dear, I've had a feeling of longing to see you again all my life since that day that I hugged you and so on in the bottom of that boat. Do you remember that too, the way the boat leaked, and how fishy it smelt and the way I held you?” The queer thing was that once more, even as he said these words, the image of the boy Tom Barter rose up.

Mary frowned, struggling desperately to evoke the scene he described. She remembered the day; she remembered the difficulty with the dam; she remembered his pleasure as they leant over the rowlocks to watch the fish; she remembered her grandfather's anger when they came home; she remembered with a peculiar sweet sort of shame having asked him various questions; but the one thing she had completely forgotten was his having hugged her “and so on.” A rather sad smile flickered across her face, a smile that she gave way to because her face was invisible to him. “You're sure you remembered right which little girl it was, John,” she said, “that you hugged that day?”

Her words arrested his attention. He could not tell whether she was mischievous or grave because he could not see her face. “You mustn't tease me like that, Mary,” he said. “You never once teased me in those days and I never once teased you. There's no need for us to be ashamed of being serious now any more than then.”

He noticed that one of her hands began to- pluck at the grass by her side but she made no reply to his words. “What do you remember, Mary,” he said, “about that day at the dam?”

The silence that followed his words was like the silence of a field at the bottom of a mountain-valley, when the setting sun touches the flanks of a herd of feeding cattle.

Mary's thoughts were like a rain of bitterness and a dew of sweetness gathered in the hollows of a tree-root. A brimming over from them all would have escaped and vanished if she had tried to express them in any sort of speech. The shame of those questions she had asked of little Johnny Crow was a sweet shame. That she had forgotten what he remembered was bitter to her. Could he be inventing? Could it really have been another little girl in another boat? How could she have forgotten whatever it was he did to her? “I must have been an imbecile/' she said to herself. ”If he were to hug me now, and so on, I should not forget!"

His voice continued to murmur on over her head; and what was this? His wrists were under her armpits and his hands covered her breasts. He was holding them very still; but her right breast was beneath one of his hands and her left breast was beneath the other. That up-flowing wave which she had fch before seemed now to encounter a down-flowing wave. Every conscious nerve of her body seemed to be responding to his hands. Her jacket and her dress intervened, or he would have felt her iieart beating. He probably did feel it beating! Her mind wandered for a second to the secluded drawing-room of Miss Euphemia Drew in the Abbey House at Glastonbury. Under the pressure of his hands she shut her eyes and leaning back in complete relaxation against his knees she gave herself up %o an inner vision of the Abbey Ruins through those great windows. How often bad she sat there in the late afternoon light in profound unhappincss watching the rooks gather about the tall elms and the shadow of the great, mutilated tower arch grow longer and longer upon flic smooth grass! How she had come to hate Glastonbury and hate the Ruins and above all hate the legend of the Grail! Tom Bailor agreed with her in all this. That had been the secret of her friendship with Tom. That and his having come from North-wold. “Mary—there's a rabbit in the asparagus-bed! Mary, the ducks are in the garden!” Oh, how she hated Miss Drew sometimes—hated her almost as much as the Ruins. And yet how good the woman had been, putting up with her moods, her sulkiness, her sheer bad temper, treating her always more like a daughter than a companion. “I hope he won't kiss me or anything else,” she thought. And then she thought, “I don't want him to take his hands away. I want him to go on like this, without a change, forever,”

And Jonn thought, “I'm English and she's English and this is England. It's more lovely to feel her little cold breasts under * these stiff clothes, on this chilly grass, than all the Paris devices.” And without formulating the thought in words he got the impression of the old anonymous ballads writ in northern dialect and full of cold winds and cold sword-points and cold spades and cold rivers; an impression wherein the chilly green grass and the peewits' cries made woman's love into a wild, stoical, romantic thing; and yet a thing calling out for bread and bed and candlelight! “Lisette would not have the faintest shadow of the faintest notion of what I'm now feeling. England! England!” How small, how very small Mary's breasts were! Why, as he held them now they seemed like the cold cups of water-lilies, not like a woman's breasts at all! God! She wasn't a woman, this new-found Love of his. She was an undine out of Harrod's Mill-pond! Yes, this is what he had been secretly craving; so long! so long! In his foxy shifts, in his wanton driftings, in his stormy reactions against the life of a great city, in his pathetic escapes into those whitewashed villages with their orchards, barley fields, and church steeples, in his crazy, reiterated attempts to do something better than the wretchedest literary hackwork, in it all, through it all, he had been pining for a moment like this. Why, this girl was his very “other self.” What luck! What incredible luck! He could feel her consciousness as he held her like this, holding her where a woman's identity, her very soul, must surely most of all lie hid! And her inmost consciousness was exactly like his own—he knew it was—exactly like his own. “Oh, I needn't kiss you or anything, Mary,” his thoughts ran. “We've met. We're together. We've got each other now. It's all done. Once for all it's all done.”