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Philip was still in an unusual state of excitement as he ran upstairs to his little room, where the gas had already been lit

His window looked out on the white road, and opposite it in the darkening hedge there was a small ash tree, whose black, sticky buds had already burst here and there into the blurred shapes of embryo leaves, shadowy and indistinct against the livid western sky. A strange exultation still throbbed in his pulses as he found himself alone in this small chamber looking out on the silent road and on that tree. He felt in no hurry to join the others. Let Zoyland entertain Barter as he pleased till he chose to *o down! He was their employer. He would dine when he felt inclined. He pushed his way past the heavy, cheap dressing-table with its great, ugly looking-glass and jerked aside the sham-lace curtains that obstructed his view. He made an effort to open the window at the top. In the flare of the gas-lamp suspended from the ceiling he saw a couple of dead flies on the narrow ledge where the window-latch was. Something about these flies, combined with the lace curtains and with the fact that he found diffi-culty in opening the window, brought his spirits down to earth. When he did jerk the window open, one of the dead flies followed it, but the other one remained upside-down, its legs stiff, its small cuirassed head inert, its body drained of all life-juices, husk-like and hollow. He flicked the dead fly with his fingernail out of the window, and resting his elbows on the woodwork leaned far out. A faint odour of funguses came to him, mingled with that peculiar smell of road-dust that bears upon it the first weight of the falling night. A rustling sound followed by a series of sleepy, peevish clucks and then by more rustling indicated the presence of roosting fowls. The little ash tree against the dying fragments of steely whiteness in the sky stretched out its branches; stretched them out with that particular upward clutch of the twig ends that characterises its tribe.

Philip's face at that moment would have presented a mask of stony human fanaticism to the senses of that little tree if they could have pierced the dark. From this air-flight, one of the first he had ever taken, he had gathered a momentum that no dead fly, however discouraging, could retard. He used it now to shoot his mind, like a rock-shattering projectile, into those remote caves of Wookey Hole out of which rolled the subterranean river that turned the wheels of his factory. A grim smile crossed his mouth when he recalled how contemptible, how unimportant, the massed towers and buttresses of Wells Cathedral had appeared as he flew above them! His thoughts clanked harshly along the up-curving branch in front of him, like a proud brigade of arrogant tin soldiers. A cold fury of destruction possessed him when he thought of Glastonbury. Arthur and the Holy Grail, Abbey Ruins and Saint Joseph—he was the man to blow them all sky-high! Communism? A thing of mere distribution of spoils! What did a meticulous economy of that kind matter? On, on, on!—destroying the past, creating the future—on, on! The hard light of his electric bulbs on the stalactites in Wookey Hole could not have glittered more fiercely, the steel surface of his new plane could not have shone more coldly than the narrowed eye-slits of Philip Crow as he drew his head back, under the hanging gas-globe, and walked over to the washbasin.

Damn! Another dead fly in his soap-dish! He tossed out the soap and carried the dish to the window and shook it there with a vindictive sweep of his arm. He felt as if his glittering onrush through the wTorld, engine after engine after engine, and himself yanking them forward with an iron heart, was outraged by the mere existence in the world of dead flies. That fellow, John—damn him, oh damn him!—was a dead fly come to life. Geard was another. Those ridiculous Dekkers were others too. Tilly, in his own house, with her black beady eyes, was yet another! All were buzzing flies, whose existence stung him in life and dispirited him in death. What was that line, in some old poet, that he had had to learn by heart at school and that he'd never forgotten? “Heads without name, no more remembered than summer-flies!” "Heads without name.*' His head had a name. Devereux—that was a name for a man to face life with!

He hurriedly washed his hands and face; plastered down his iron-grey hair over his narrow skull, grinned like a wolf at himself in the ugly looking-glass and ran downstairs. An unexpected shock was awaiting him as he entered the little parlour full of small supper-tables. There were Zoyland and Barter, laughing together, already warmed by Zoyland's wine; but there at another table—and they rose at once to greet him—were Dave and Percy Spear! They must have been agitating all day and collecting names in his Wookey Hole plant. But he could not restrain his pleasure in seeing them there. How perfect she looked in this dim inn-parlour light! He thought Dave looked a trifle embarrassed—and no wonder, the revolutionary rogue!—as they shook hands; but she—she was his; her eyes told him she was his! He knew it in the marrow of his bones as she leant towards him, giving h\rry—not only her ungloved hand, but everything! Yes; she was like that long swaying ash-tree branch, just budding, in the night out there.

He hurriedly crossed over to his own place, jested coldly about Zoyland having opened the bottle, murmured something sarcastically to Barter about “propitiating his Bolsheviki relatives” and carried his chair to the Spears' table.

“Have you brought your stiletto for the wicked Capitalist?” cried Will Zoyland.

“Aye, what's that, Will?” threw in Dave.

“I asked Percy if she'd got her dagger hidden away in her underlinen to give Crow his quietus,” repeated Lord P.'s bastard, winking at Barter.

Barter's face at that moment was indeed one in which could be read “strange matters.” The wine had heated him; otherwise he would have found the whole situation bristling with discomfort. His cautious upper-middle-class respectability had already been outraged to its foundations by Zoyland's noisy camaraderie. Zoyland and his brother-in-law's wife had by this time exchanged not a few strokes of reckless roguery.

Barter's lecherousness had for years been roused to a fever of aggravation by Percy Spear. He had seen more of her in their Norfolk childhood than he had seen of any of her cousins and he had used her young figure on many a sex-starved occasion for the satisfaction of his amorous thoughts. But Percy had never let him touch her. She disliked him mentally and she loathed h™ physically. But she was ready enough to chaff him; and when she did this she always bewildered him by her clever modernity.

Barter had felt a horrible sense of social inferiority just now as he had sat sullenly drinking William Zoyland's wine. His family was in reality quite as “good” as that of the Crows; but he totally lacked the suppleness of the Crow mind. He was in fact socially old-fashioned; and to be old-fashioned at this date meant being made a fool of by clever women.

It was still more uncomfortable for him when Philip appeared and began his dinner at the Spear's table. Zoyland had called for a second bottle and had begun to grow slightly tipsy; and with his tipsiness extremely confidential. Even so, he didn't treat Barter—at least so Barter thought— like a real equal. He confided in him blindly, grossly, callously; a good deal as a gentleman would confide in a faithful servant of whose discretion he was sure but towards whose personal reactions to what he confessed he felt complete indifference.

Tom Barter had not one single relative of any kind living. He had never been to the university. His diploma of social position went back to an earlier date; for he had been to Grey-lands School. He had entered an office at nineteen and since then had lived for two things, lechery and money. He had seen to it that these two things did not clash by habitually taking his pleasures cheaply. This he did by eschewing harlots and mistresses and by enjoying constantly new adventures with flirtatious middle-class girls. With shopgirls, business-girls, waitresses, barmaids, Barter always won favour, partly by reason of his being a gentleman, partly by his shameless advances, but most of all by a certain direct, unassumed, cynical but very honest interest in all their professional problems. They felt at home with him. They trusted him. And except for depriving them of pretensions to “purity,” he really was to be trusted!

“She's alone there; and of course he may have gone over. He may be over there now, as I clink this glass! But I don't think so. A person has instincts in these things, don't you agree, Barter? Instincts. You know what I mean, Barter? But perhaps you don't! Perhaps you despise instincts! You rather look like some one who despises instincts. What would you do, Barter, if you were married and your wife fell in love with a young chap of her own age? Eh? What would you do? Would you let him pull your nose and say nothing? Have you ever had your nose pulled, Barter? I mean really and truly pulled? Would you let him do it? Tweak your nose, and give it a good pull?”

Tom Barter's fingers itched to give his aristocratic friend what at school was called a bloody nose. Short of hitting him, however (and what chance would he have in fisticuffs with such a fellow?), he could not just then think of any method of putting him to rout.

“That's my way, Barter, and so now you know it. It mayn't be a good way; but it's my way and when it comes to women it's no good unless you're playing your own hand. They don't give a fig for book-learning, Barter. Perhaps you've never seen thro' their pinnies far enough to know that? But that's the truth. Not a fig! What women like is bed-rock-bottom—every time! You can't go wrong with them—from Queen Gargamelle to Maid Marian—if you talk facts and think smut. You seem to me a downright man-to-woman kind of chap, Barter, so I expect you've found that out for yourself. But perhaps not. Perhaps you're puritanical and have never meddled with the hussies. I don't think so, though—you look to me as if you knew a hawk from a hernshaw!”

Tom Barter could only drink more and more wTine, as he did his best to carry off this uncomfortable situation. In his heart he longed to be back at number fifteen, Northload Street, drinking whiskey with John. How different John was from this bearded rufEan! If hatred had the power to kill, Lord P.'s bastard wrould certainly not have played guide again to any more stalactite caves! “Not one of these people cares a fig what becomes of poor Tom,” Barter thought, as he grew more and more sulkily monosyllabic, under Zoyland's heavy joking. “At this moment, as I sit here, not one single human being is giving me a thought. None of the wenches I make love to in Glastonbury care a tinker's dam for me really! Mary used to think of me sometimes; a little; just a little; but God! now John's appeared, I am out of it there, too. Crummie turned on me like a spitfire pussy-cat the last time I saw her. Who have I got in the whole bloody world? Nemo, nihil, none! Not a living soul!” And then his mind went back to the Northwold River and the talk he had had with John about those childish times. John was something. He was the Past and that was something. “I like old John,'' he said to himself. ”By God I believe when I'm fooling with old John I don't feel as if I were quite alone. 'Twas a queer idea of his though—what he hinted at this afternoon—that I should get a job under Geard, when they make him Mayor, and give Philip the go-by! I must talk to John a bit more about that. There'd be nothing permanent in that though. But, by Jiminy, it would be almost worth it, just to watch Philip's face when I told him!"

“Why do you say 'yes' like that, Barter? You think I'm drunk. You're not listening! I asked you whether you thought I was a fellow who could be cuckolded with impunity. And you said 'yes.'”

“I meant 'impunity' for a time, Will; while you led the person on; and let them make a fool of themselves.”

A dangerous gleam shot forth between the candles from Zoy-land's drunken Teutonic eyes. It annoyed him to be called “Will” by Barter, just as it annoyed Philip to be called “Phil.” “Fool be damned! You don't know what I'm talking about, Barter. When I give up my girl to her lover I'm not revenging myself on anyone; I'm . . . I'm . . . I'm acting altogether outside the wretched herd of common human animals! I'm . . . I'm . . . Ym acting like a god, little man!” His drunken voice was so loud that Dave and Percy and Philip ceased talking among themselves and stared at him. Philip got up and came towards him, followed after an interval by the husband and wife.

“Don't you start bullying our friend Tom, Zoyland,” said Philip coldly, fixing a Norseman's eye upon the gigantic toper.

“Oh, you shut up!” growled the other. “For a very little I'd chuck both of ye into the bally road!”

Philip shrugged his shoulders and turned to Spear. “Dave,” he said, while Barter got up sulkily from his seat and went over to Persephone, who stood regarding the whole group with dreamy amusement, “do you mind, Dave, if I took Cousin Percy out for a stroll down this 'road' be talks about?”

The girl gave a start and glanced quickly at her husband. A look, quick as lightning, from her dark, languorous eyelids, said,

“May I go with him? I'd rather like to go with him, Dave. But I won't if you don't want me top5 While a look, a little slower to come, replied from Dave's ruddy face,. ”Go, by all means, if you want to, my dear; wrhy not?"

''Hullo, Dave, are you going to lecture me, too?“ drawled Zoyland, as if he had noticed the presence of his brother-in-law for the first time. ”Tu Brute, Dave! Then Big Willy must reallv behave himself and be polite to these solemn money-grubbers/''

“Dave will amuse you, William, while Philip and I get a breath of air,” said the girl cajolingly. “And mind I'll speak to Nell about you, if you drink any more tonight! I'll be seeing her at Tilly's party, if not before.”

Dave obediently sat dowm by the man with the great beard. He looked, as he did so, just as if he had been some sagacious young clerk-in-holy-orders taking his seat at the dais by the side of an angry Charlemagne.

“I like you, Dave Spear,” said the Bastard, “your bloody Communism is all poppycock, but I'm damned if you're not more of a man than any of us here; and you can tell Nell I said so.” He stretched out his hand as he spoke, and laid it on Dave's knee, while an effusion of melting German-student sentimentality made his blue eyes moist.