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He moved up close to her. She could see by his eyes that he was going to touch her.

“No, no! No, no!” she murmured. “You and I are too old for that, Tom. Listen, my dear! Why don't you do what John is always talking to me about? Why don't you chuck Philip and work with John for a bit? That man wants you; you know he does. He'd jump out of his skin to have you with him!”

They stared at each other with a long, puzzled stare, after these words had left her lips. Both of them, with an unconscious movement, glanced towards the door. Mary had not had the least idea that she was going to suggest what she had just suggested. It was as if the presence of Mr. Geard under the same roof had confused her wits.

“No! Of course you can't leave Philip,” she said hurriedly. “It's your work; I know—and there's your plane too. I can't think what made me say that, just then------- It was only ... it was only • . . Oh, I feel that both you and I, Tom, want something to change . . . something to go to smash in our life; so that we can start again. Isn't that true? But, you needn't speak. I know too well it's true!”

They looked at each other then with another of their long, heavy-eyed, puzzled, unyielding. East-Anglian looks, those old heathen, sullen looks, full of the obduracy of rooted poplars in driving sleet.

They each needed something from the other—something which, in all the world, that other alone could give—but between them there seemed to emerge, emanating like a monstrous offspring from their sterile psychic embraces, a huge, dark obstacle, not to be overstepped.

Mary had come out of that room, where the presence of Mr. Geard was so odious to her, and where the whole aura reeked of these Glastonbury morbidities; she had come out with a reckless urge of forlorn hope to get some help from Tom.

He had come from his wretched vigil in that cafe, at a desperate run and with a blind leap, like a frantic prisoner catching at one chance in a thousand, to get he knew not what from this Norfolk girl. But their mutual plunge ended here . . . they both knew it . . . ended here with this long, sullen, helpless look . . . ended here with the same baffled frustration with which their friendship had always ended, when it tried to break away from the impeding limits set by the fatality of their own characters!

“Can I get out of here?” he said, when his eyes had drawn up the great empty plummet-net he had let down from the unan-swering depths of her eyes, “Out of this place, without meeting anyone?”

She gave a quick sigh as if aroused by his words from a trance that was obscurely baffling into a reality that was labour and struggle.

“Of course, Tom,” she said. “Come this way! I'll let you out through the back.”

She blew out the two candles on the table and with his nostrils full of the sour taste of carbonic-acid gas he followed her to the door. There was one moment, as she touched the door-handle by the dying flicker of the fire, that he felt a longing . . . not sensual nor passionate, but simply sad and love-starved ... to clasp her well-known form in his arms. But he did not dare. The moment perished forever in the white smoke of those two tall candles, and he followed her on tip-toe through the dim-lighted hall. He was not unaware of the irony of his passing now, with only a silent nod and a casual glance, those two pretty figures seated at the kitchen-table enjoying their supper. Purged he surely was, at that moment, of his wonted lecherv!

Mary opened the door into the garden and shivering a little, for she had forgotten to put on any wrap, led him, across the daffodil-bed and the fading crocuses, to the edge of King Edgar's Lawn.

Here she gave him her hand and let him squeeze it in his strong air-pilot's fingers, till it tingled and smarted.

“You know that place in the wall,” she called out softly after him, “where it's easy to climb?”

He made no answer. He only turned and lifted his hand to his head, saluting her thus as he would have saluted some superior officer if he had been . . . what would have suited him so well to be! . . . the careful sergeant-major of a garrison of besieged soldiers.

She watched his short sturdy figure, after that, as it vanished with never another look round.

A tide of inexpressible sadness flowed through her heart. Tom was gone; and she had got scant comfort from him—and Tom was gone; back to his wretched quarters in High Street! Or would his lonely, unsatisfied mood put into his stubborn head to drift on, past his own door, to that cheerful Northload room, which was her own prepared bridal-chamber?

She glanced up at the great broken tower-columns of the vanished nave of the Abbey Church. Would other girls, all the way down the centuries, she thought, look up at those two stupendous pillars and fill the space between them, in their sad imagination, with the high carved arch full of wafted incense and choir-echoes and deep-voiced prayers? What had she hoped to get from Tom, or he from her? Neither of them had seemed to know! It had all ended anyway, just as so many of their old encounters had done, in a sense of weary frustration.

Ruins! Ruins! It was not only in ancient stone that baffled human hopes held up their broken outlines, their sad skeleton-patterns, as resting places for the birds of the night! She was on the point of turning, of retracing her steps across the dark flower-beds where fading crocuses and new-sprouting tulips drank in, in silent long-breath^ draughts, the secret influences of the darkness, when she was suddenly caught up. completely caught up, out of herself, as she never in her life had been before by any natural power.

There, very low down in the western sky, about a couple of yards, according to human measurement, above the bounding wall of the enclosure, was the coracle-like crystal shell of the crescent moon in her first quarter.

There was nothing to which it could be compared! Unique, in all the universe of matter, if only by reason of the associations hung about it of twenty-five thousand years of human yearning, it floated there before her, daughter and darling of the dark terrestrial orb, elf-waif of the infinite night! What hands, what arms, had stretched forth to it, out of their human misery— brown arms, white arms, black arms—what heart-cries, “I want! I want! I want!” had been tossed up towards it, from groaning hairy chests and soft-swelling tender breasts and the troubled nerves of bewildered children! And ever, and especially, had it been the comforter and the accomplice, and the confederate of women, gathering their life-streams towards itself, guarding their mystic chastity, nourishing their withdrawals, their reticences, their furtive retreats and denials, companioning them when all else failed!

It would draw the vast, bottomless salt tides towards it—this slender night-waif, this leaf of tender sorrow, this filmy weft of hope against hope—ere it had rounded to its full! Shoals of glittering fins would follow its pathway across the Atlantic . . . on far-off untraversed moorlands its reflection would turn the ripples to silver. In pools where even the wild geese in their equinoctial migrations, never disturbed the silence, its frail image would rock among the reeds. On no different, on no changed a shape from this, upon which she now gazed and trembled, the great magicians of antiquity had stared and muttered; their predictions confounded, their inspirations perverted, their wits turned! Here floated the virgin-mistress of the tragic madness of maids, the patroness of all defiers of man's laws! Here was the girl-child from the dim shores of ancient anarchy, at whose bright and horned head the kings and the priests of man-made tradition have alwTays shivered and quaked in their sacred sandals! She has been the tutelary mistress of all sterile passions, of all wild revolts against 6lhe Mothers," that have led the viigins of prophecv to shatter this world's laws. That shapeless conch of dangerous whiteness, tossing herself, through the scudding drifts of ship-swallowing seas, rocking like a sea-mew in the rigging of doomed ships, gleaming in the cold dews of uncounted dawns upon blood-stained Golgothas and lost battlefields, and now shining down, calm and lovely, upon hillside fairy-rings and upon smooth, wide-stretching, glittering sands, has always been the forlorn hope of the impossible; has always been the immortal challenge to What Is, from, the wavering margins of What Might Be!

The popular opinion that the moon is a planetary fragment, broken off from the earth or from the sun, is probably a gross and clumsily conceived error! Much more likely is it that she is the last-remaining fragment of some earlier stellar system, a system of material forms and shapes now altogether lost, but in its origin nearer to the beginning of things in the ambiguous imaginings of the Primal Cause.

Surely, not only in the Religions of this planet has she played a dominant and inextinguishable role. But she has always been on the side of the weak and the sick against the strong and the well-constituted! With her silvery horns of Mystery gathered in the folds of that blue robe or bearing up those divine feet of the Maid-Mother of the Crucified she has challenged the whole authoritative reign of Cause-and-Effect itself. And it was this whiteness beyond all whiteness; it was this whiteness, like the wet curves of unimaginable sea-shells and like the spray about the prows of fairy ships, that now came with its magical touch to bring healing to Mary Crow.

The girl stood transfixed on the chilly edge of that bed of cold, pale-leafed immature tulips. She stared and stared at the celestial visitant, as if she had never before seen the moon, under any sky.

“What does it make me feel?” she thought. “Is there something about it that every woman who has ever lived in Glastonbury must feel? Something that the Lake Village women felt? Something that immured, mediaeval nuns were comforted by?”

Her body as well as her spirit fell now into a wordless prayer to that white, floating, immortal creature. “Bury. oh. bury your strange secret in my breast!” the girl's heart cried out. “Bury it deep, deep in my womb, so that henceforth to the end of my days, something cold and free and uncaught may make me strong!”

As soon as Mat Dekker and Mr. Geard were out of the house, the former explained to the latter that he had an important visit to make that night before he retired, “to a woman dying of cancer near the Crowr factory.”

Mr. Geard seemed, in spite of this information, very reluctant to part from the Vicar of Glastonbury. He proposed to Mr. Dekker that they should stroll up Chilkwell Street together and take a glance in the darkness at Chalice House. “I'd like to know what you think, Vicar,” he said, in his thick, unctuous voice, “about my scheme for altering the old place. If I don't buy it it may fall into the hands of the Papists again. And yet they're asking a fancy price. Just come and take a look, won't you, Sir?”

Mat Dekker permitted himself to be led past the Tithe Barn and up Chilkwell Street.

“What I had in my mind,” said Mr. Geard, in a self-satisfied voice, when they had skirted the high blank wTall of Chalice House and had reached the particular garden hedge beyond which lay the Sacred Fount, 'Vas to build a wall here that would be worthy of the Blood“ He uttered this last word in a casual, matter-of-fact way, as if he had said, ”worthy of the view“ or ”worthy of our age," and a certain flavor of unctuous gusto in his tone was especially repellent to Mat Dekker.

“With an entrance, I suppose?” said this latter.

But it now transpired that Mr. Geard had not considered an entrance. What he had been thinking about was guarding, protecting, defending, consecrating “the Blood,” as he called this chalybeate spring. He had been so preoccupied in keeping sacrilege out, that he had not considered how to bring devotion in.

Mat Dekker as a professional priest naturally had his flock in mind. “You wTon*t charge any entrance-fee, I hope?” he went on. “Since the place has been empty the caretaker has been taking tips; but I don't like that at all. Everybody ought lo be free to drink of this water!*”

Mr. Geard approached the thick hedge; and ascending the little bank below it plunged his arms and his face into the early spring freshness—the hedge exhaled a delicate fragrance as he touched it; a fragrance that flowed out into the darkness on all sides.

“No—no,” said Bloody Johnny, stepping back into the road, “I'll have a Saxon arch and a heavy door with a bell inside—a loud bell—with a rope hanging down.”

“Why a Saxon arch?*' remarked Mr. Dekker. ”I don't think there were any Saxon arches—wasn't it the Normans who------v

“Brought the Devil with 'em,'5 cried Mr. Geard, ”and the Devil's gentlemen! No, no. There's going to be one Saxon arch at any rate in Glastonbury. Our oldest charter is a Saxon Charter. Our oldest real Abbots are Saxon Abbots. Our oldest real kings are Saxon kings. If King Arthur comes back—as my wife's cousin says he will—he'll have to ring my Saxon bell in my Saxon wall. My own folk haven't one drop—not one drop—of gentlemen's blood. I'm going to give back Chalice Well to the People, Mr, Dekker!"

The man's hoarse voice had risen to that rich, rolling tone of rhetorical unction that the Glastonbury street corners had come to know so well before he went away to Norfolk.

“Give back Chalice Well to the People,” sounded over and over again in Mr. Dekker's ears, as the two men retraced their steps. Outside the Vicarage gate they stopped to say good-night to each other. They instinctively turned round, as they did so, to catch a glimpse of the tall elms growing in the Abbey enclosure between the boundary wall and those foundations of the Chapel of King Edgar that had been discovered by supernatural aid.

The new moon had long ago gone down but the sky was clear; and over their heads stretched the long, faint, whitish track of the Milky Way.

Geard snuffed the night air like a great sick ox, that had been kept too long in its winter-stall. As Mat Dekker looked at him now he got an impression of a reserve of power—of some kind of power—that was actually startling.

“This Religious Fair of mine,” said Mr. Geard, “will be some thing quite different iron: the Oberar.jn:ergau Passion Play. Mr. jnhn Crcv,. who. 3»\ the v,ay. is a most intelligent young man,5' Mat Dekkf-r M2i:icc ik t;:^ darkness at this i ”with a good deal more religion than he tn:::ks he h^s—has received so many replies ixnm all over the wond. that I really think this occasion is so inn to he quite an important one in the history of our country.**