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“Sam . . . oh, Sam!” She was in his arms in a moment; and for a brief space of time their simple, unadulterated craving for each other's presence, satisfied now so deeply, drowned every other consideration. “Sit down, Sam: oh my dear, oh my dear!” And she pulled, with violent tugs, at her linen over-all till she had got it over her head. She tossed the thing down on the sofa first; and then, to make room for them to sit side by side on that piece of furniture, she quickly folded up the garment and flung it across the back of a chair.

They sat side by side, now, his hand clasping hers; too happy, simply to be together, to do anything but drink up each other's identity. “I thought this morning,” she murmured, “Sam may come today! But I never thought you really would.”

“Oh, Nelly, my little, little Nelly!” He lifted up his hands and pushing back her hair from her forehead drew her face towards him. The girl's lips parted under his passionate kiss; and when he let her go her head dropped forward like a flower whose stem has been broken. Not a flicker, not a ripple of shame, not a shadow of the least awTareness of any change in his recent mood swept across his consciousness when he kissed Nell Zoyland like that!

It must be remembered that Sam's idea of what it meant to struggle to live “the life of a saint” was a very different thing from any notion that his father would have entertained, had Mat Dekker aimed at such a state! Xot that it would be any easier to be a saint in Sam's way than to be a saint in his father's way. In some respects it would be more difficult. For one thing it would require a casuistry more sharp-edged, more flexible, more searching and yet not less exacting! Sam's whole attitude towards his feelings as he sat on Nell's sofa turned on the point—though he did not analyse it—as to whether this ecstasy he got from the girl was just sensuality or something quite different from sensuality. Without analysing his feelings, he knew in his heart that it was very different: and this knowledge, penetrating his whole being, saved him from any pricks of conscience. In his unanalyti-cal way, Sam was not so blinded by passion, as he breathed in and breathed out the paradisiac air of her presence, as not to be vaguely conscious of a delicious surprise. It was a surprise to him to find that he was not torn by any moral conflict. He had pushed back the thought of such a conflict to the furthest margin of his mind. But somewhere in his spirit he had been expecting it; and now it had not come! There was no conflict. His thrilling happiness with Nell, since the girl was as she was, brought him nothing but a great flooding wave of absolute peace. The trouble between them had risen from Nell's nature then, not from his? It was the woman, not the man, wThose conscience had been torn? Well! if Nell felt no shame now; if Nell felt no division in her heart, all was well. The personality of Will Zoyland on the moral horizon of Sam's life wTas no more to him than the willows and poplars of Queen's Sedgemoor on its physical horizon.

As for the girl herself, her recent decision in Zoyland's favour and her return to his bed had been all along of a very special and peculiar nature. The girl's real unconscious motive in this action —an action whose immediate repercussion upon herself had produced that terrible turmoil of mal-ease which had seized upon her in Saint John's Church—had been revenge upon Sam for not taking a bold, drastic and final step in their relations, in other words, for not carrying her off!

It is women's fatal susceptibility to passionate touch that hypnotises them into by far the greater number of their disasters; for under this touch-hypnosis the present transform* it-eli into the eternal, and their grand sex-defence, their conseiou=ne« of continuity, their awareness of the future as an integral portion of the present, is shattered and broken up. The ideal love-affairs for women are when it is easy for them, after these momentary plunges into the eternal, to fall back again upon their realistic sense of continuity; whereas the ideal love-affairs for men are when their feeling for novelty and for adventure is perpetually being re-aroused by the bewildering variability of women's moods.

“I've been thinking of you all the while, Sam,'” she said now. as Sam leant over her, clutching one of her hands with both his, and pressing it deeply into the fold of her lap. “The other day— was it the day before yesterday?—Yes! I think so . . . but I seem to have lost all sense of time ... I started re-planting some wild-flowers, out there on the bank . . . meadow orchises they were . . . and suddenly I couldn't bear it, not seeing you. and I came running in and fell on the sofa and cried and cried. It was this very sofa,” she went on in a changed voice and with what was evidently a swift, sudden vision of the vagaries of time, “where we're now sitting. Oh, my dear* oh, my dear, I never thought it would all come true!”

She cried from pure happiness now, letting the tears fall upon the back of his fingers as he pressed her clenched hand deep into her lap; and she got a wild, exultant pleasure from the very shamelessness of her tears, not attempting to stay them, but letting them roll down her cheeks even while she lifted up her bowed head and looked at him.

“Have you been cooking properly for yourself, Nell?” Sam suddenly enquired. The question mightily amused her; and she laughed out loud as she wiped away her tears.

“Why yes, Sam . . . yes, I have,” she answered, “only I don't quite know what you mean by 'properly.' I've got a large bit of cold boiled bacon. That's the only meat I've been having just now . . . but I've been making myself some cheese omelets and . . . oh, I don't know! Why are you so inquisitive?”

Sam didn't smile. With some reason he felt he had got upon shaky ground. That bacon had been, no doubt, provided to suit the taste of the master of the house! “I went this morning,” he said, “with John Crow and that man Evans, who's at Old Jones” shop, to the top of the Tor. Crow's working for Geard; you know that? They're going to have some sort of a Passion Play on Midsummer's Day. Crow asked this fellow Evans to act as the Christ in it. He's been sending off their circulars far and wide . . . even abroad, so he says. I am sure I can't imagine what Father will make of it all/*

“Geard's working against Philip and his factories, isn’t he?'” she responded. “'Do you know, Sam, I'm sure there's something between Philip and my sister-in-law, Percy. My brother sees nothing. He'll never see anything, till it's all too late!”

Sam pondered; but not on the misdoings of Percy Spear. “I like what IVe seen of your brother, Nell,” he said. “But he doesn't really think there's a chance of England becoming communistic in our lifetime, does he?”

The girl gave a little sigh. “4Oh, I don't know, my dear! I've never thought much about it . . . one way or the other, I suppose he does. But I oughtrTt to speak for Dave. I'm afraid he doesn't find me clever enough to talk to, about things like that. Sam, have you heard any gossip in town about Philip and Persephone?”

Sam smiled grimly. “IVe heard gossip in town about Mrs. Zoyland and Sam Dekker,” he said.

Her eyelashes flickered under his word and she turned her head; but a second later she tore her hands from his grasp and flung thern round his neck. “Love me, love me, Sam!” she whispered. They forgot everything then in a much more passionate kiss than their first one.

When they drew apart at last, S«m could not help murmuring a very naive question. “How on earth was it that you ever came to care for me, Nell? Except one poor little town-girl at Cambridge, that I ought never to have meddled with, no woman has ever bothered herself about me. You're far too beautiful for a clown like me, Nell. You ought to be the pet of the greatest prince on the earth!”

The oldest of all feminine smiles crossed her face. Towards her lover's high-pitched worship a woman can grow as tenderly humorous as the slyest cynic in the world. His infatuated- rapture in her beauty becomes as nothing, in comparison with'^be desperate sweetness of her surrender to him. There are levels of feminine emotion in the state of love entirely and forever unknown to men. Man's imaginative recognition of feminine charm, man's greedy lust, man's pride in possession, man's tremulous sense of the pathos of femininity, man's awe in the presence of an abysmal mystery—all these feelings exist in a curious detachment in his consciousness. They are all separate from the blind subcurrent that sweeps the two together. But with women, when they are really giving themselves up without reserve, a deep underflow of abandonment is reached, where such detachment from Nature ceases completely. At such times the woman does not feel herself to be beautiful or desirable. She does not feel her lover to be handsome or strong or clever or brave. She might be the most abject of the daughters of her race. He might be the least admirable of the sons of his race. His body, his face, might be disfigured, deformed, dirty, derelict; his personality might be contemptible. She has reached a level of emotion where everything about him is accepted and taken for granted; and not only so, but actually seen for what it is, without a flicker of idealism. She has reached a level where in sublime, unconscious humility she takes as her possessor this image, this simulacrum, this poor figure of earth; and as she does so, she accepts in exactly the same way her own most grievous limitations, discounting ironically and tenderly, wdth an understanding that is deeper than cynicism itself, all his erotic amorous illusions.

There is thus, in a woman's love, when it has sunk to this level, no illusion left. He is wThat he is and she may be what she may be! Infirm, cowardly, conceited, stupid, he is her man. She has given herself to him as a free gift. He is her possessor. She belongs now-, not to herself, but to him. The danger implicit in this absoluteness of a woman's love, when she really gives herself up, is that a man should get a glimpse of its sublime realism. Architect of illusion as he is, it is only in the full volume and top crest of his love that a man can bear an inkling of how realistically his woman regards him below the surface of her flattery. His love for her will probably weaken before hers does for him. And this will happen just because his love depends on an exaggerated admiration of her, which, if he is not something of a Don Quixote, will pass away by degrees. The tragic danger of the “absoluteness” of her love will arrive when he has really got tired of her and has come to regard her as a stranger to his mind and a burden upon his spirit. At this point his vanity will soon teach him, and her “crossness” and “sensitiveness” will soon teach him. that she is completely free from every illusion about his personality. And then another element will enter. The slow cooling of his love for her will rouse in the woman a blind anger; an anger directed, not so much against the poor, weak man himself, as against all men, and incidentally against all the laws of Nature; and yielding to this anger she will not care how much she hurts his feelings. Let him suffer a little on the surface—which is all he understands!—while she is suffering such tortures in the depths! In this mood how can she resist taking advantage of her knowledge of his character? How can she help prodding and stinging him where she knows it will hurt the most?

What in any woman renders a union lasting is the power of letting her man see that she likes him extremely in addition to loving him. What in any man renders a union lasting is this element of the rational-irrational “Don Quixote” in his mind and soul. And wherein consists this Don Quixote element? It consists in an act of the imaginative will; an act of the man's soul that is actually creative; an act by means of which he sets up his particular Dulcinea del Toboso in an indestructible and imperishable niche. The act of the imaginative will to which I refer gives a man, in fact, the poorer to treat his woman, in her lifetime, as if she were dead . . . which is the rarest essence of human relationship and the supreme triumph over matter of the human spirit.

It was when Sam looked at her after he had said, “You ought to be the pet of the greatest prince upon earth,” that Nell Zoyland knew that if she could belong to him, and to him alone, they two would be constantly and permanently happy. For the girl saw in his look at that moment that deep, obstinate, half-mad creative look, the look of the artist, of the saint; the look of Something which the ebb and the flow of her woman's moods would have no powei to change: and which nothing In lift: t.nuld change; for it sprang from that Don Quixote dement in j. nun* spirit whicli transcends the astronomical univcrsf.

The girl became very silent and quiet after she had caught that look on Sam's face. Her realistic woman's mind was now running, like a little ash-coloured mouse, from plank to plank of the drifting barge of their imbroglio, hunting for the least cranny or crack or hole, by which they could slip overboard and change their destiny. Sam naturally mistook her rapid concentrated thinking for the descent of sadness upon her; and to change her mood he asked her what she thought of Tom Barter. He had arrived at this gentleman, as a topic of harmless conversation, by recalling how the man had been present with Philip on the last occasion when he himself was in this room. It seemed a whole year ago, tonight, that feverish encounter, and he had no wish to dwell on it now. But Mr. Barter of the Crow Dye Mills would serve as wTell as anything else to distract a sad mistress! She awoke from her abstracted train of thought with a start: but could not help smiling at his question. “He thinks I'm only interested, like all women,” she said to herself, “in personal matters.”

'“I heard Dave talk about him the other day,'9 she remarked, while Sam rose to his feet and stood with his hands in his pockets gazing at her in a peaceful ecstasy. ”He said the Corporation of Glastonbury was going to start a factory of their own ... a factory belonging to the working-people of the town ... to everybody in fact, but of course the poor people are the majority. He says this man Geard is going to be the new Mayor and going to see this through. He says Geard's going to get Mr. Barter to leave Philip, and be the manager of this new concern. He says their Midsummer Pageant will be the opening day of it; and that it'll be a real communistic experiment. He says John Crow has made this man Geard quite enthusiastic about it; and you know how rich he is!"