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It might, however, have appeared to an observer curious in antiquarian lore that compared with similar retreats there was about this scene in spite of the presence of the church something essentially heathen and secular. The disproportioned size of the Rectory and its great lawns compared with both church and village gave an impression of the existence on that spot—at least a former existence—of something high-handed and predatory. In other words there was displayed in all this sequestered felicity the same Danish tendency to profane self-assertion that has been noted in the character of the Northwold villagers. “Possess, enjoy, defy” might have been the heraldic motto of both rich and poor in this portion of East Anglia.

While the sexton was lazily and contentedly shovelling into the grave, on the top of the earth-covered coffin, all the good Norfolk clay, so auspicious for the growing of roses, that had been piled up at the foot of the hole—and be it noted that several lob-worms and several lively little red worms, which are so irresistible to Wissey perch, went down into that hole with the clay—there hovered round the body in the coffin a phantasmagoria of dream-like thoughts. These thoughts did not include any distaste for being buried or any physical shrinking, but they included a calm, placid curiosity as to whether this dream-like state was the end of everything, or the beginning of something else. Nerves of enjoyment, nerves of suffering, both were atrophied in this cold, sweet-sickly, stinking corpse; but around and about it, making a diffused “body” for itself out of the ether that penetrated clay and planks and grass-roots and chilly air, all alike, the soul of the dead man was obsessed by confused memories, and deep below these by the vague stirring of an unim-passioned, neutral curiosity.

William Crow was in his ninety-first year but he had never experienced such intense curiosity since his son Philip in his twen tieth year had run away and married an unknown woman.

Up and down, up and down, these memories kept washing, Backward and forward they washed, they drifted, they eddied And always, far beneath them, the root of curiosity stirred tremulously, like a lazily swaying seaweed, beneath an ebbing and flowing sea-tide.

The eyelids of the old, dead face under the coffin-lid were tightly closed; and the mouth, that eloquent actor's mouth, was a little open; but what remained totally unchanged was the beautiful, snow-white hair covering the round skull on every side with curls as silky as those of a child.

The memories of this death-cold skull gravitated always to-wards the image of his long-dead wife. No emotion did they excite, not one tremulous flicker, either of love or hate; only upon each separate memory that calm curiosity turned its neutral gaze.

“A thoroughly mean man . . . that's what you are, William, a thoroughly mean and cruel man! That sad look in your eyes that you always say is sensitiveness is really cruelty! That's what it is. Just cold-blooded malicious cruelty . . • and sensual too, oh, wickedly, wickedly sensual!”

With the absolute calm of a botanist observing a plant did the curiosity in the soul of this corpse listen to this whisper of memory.

And again the voice of the proud lady out of her Swiss grave penetrated the Norfolk clay.

“Elizabeth Devereux to William Crow! I was a fool ever to marry such a person as you, William. Mother always said it was marrying beneath me.”

The mouth of the dead face fell open a little further and the terrible, unapproachable silence of decomposition deepened.

“My Philip's son will be like his father,” the woman's voice reiterated. “He'll be all me! He'll be a true Philip Devereux. He'll have no touch of the Dane in him.”

The confinement of the coffin-boards was nothing to William Crow. The raw clay, rattling noisily down from the sexton's spade, was less than nothing to him. To suffer from anything, lo enjoy anything—he had forgotten what those words meant. Enjoyment, suffering? What strange, morbid by-issues of human consciousness were these?

But the voice of the woman began again; and that cold, disinterested curiosity stirred placidly to hear her words.

“Yes! You may look at yourself in the looking-glass as long as you like, William. That sad, weary look under your eyebrows, over your eyelids, is nothing but selfish cruelty . . . such as kills flies and torments people without hitting them! My family has always taken what it wanted. But it never stooped to spiteful tormenting. My father used to say that when Norman families stop ruling England, England will get soft and wordy and mean . . . just like you, William. . . .”

With impervious calm, as he listened to all this, did the soul oi that passive corpse wonder vaguely whether this Devereux despotism was, or was not, the true secret of dealing with earth-life below the sun. It wondered too, with the same complacent indifference, whether the humming of these confused memories was going to lapse into what they called “eternal rest” or going to prelude some new and surprising change. Whichever it was, it was equally interesting, now that pleasure and pain were both gone. Annihilation—how strange! A new conscious life—how strange! What indeed the soul of the Rector of Northwold experienced, at that moment of his burial, was more like the Homeric view of death than anything else—only with more indifference to love and fame! Everything human in him was, in fact, subsumed in that primeval urge which originally lost us Paradise. The Reverend William, cold and stiff, cared for nothing except to satisfy his curiosity.

Meanwhile in the great Rectory drawing-room another and a far less disinterested curiosity was mounting up, mounting up to a positive suffering of totalisation, as Mr. Anthony Didlingtoa looking so much like a character of Sir Walter Scott that you expected him, after every resounding period from his parchment document,t0 take a vigorous pinch of snufl—read the late Canon's will.

John and Mary had ensconced themselves on a small eighteenth-century sofa, that had the air of being the identical sofa that gave a title to Cowper's poem; and that stood back, behind the more pretentious pieces of furniture, near the furthest window.

In the most important place in the room sat Tilly Crow, Philip's wife, a small, trim, dark, little woman with a high forehead, carefully parted hair, black, beady eyes, and under her chin a colossal wedgewood brooch. Opposite Mrs. Philip, on the further side of the hearth where a warm fire was burning, sat Elizabeth Crow in her mother's little green velvet arm-chair which the great black satin dress of the portly lady filled to overflowing. Her face was*weary and wistful rather than unhappy; but above and beneath her firmly modelled cheeks and rugged cheek-bones those quaintly indented creases were extremely marked, whose contractions, according to Mary, were an indication that there was trouble in the wind. Lawyer Didlington with sedate pontifical gravity sat on a high chair with his back to the largest window. Not a glance did he give at that gracious lawn, across the smooth surface of which the long afternoon shadows from lime-tree and cedar-tree were already falling.

Close to the lawyer's table, and taking not much more notice of the shadows on the lawn than he did, sat at another table, with writing materials ostentatiously displayed in front of them, Dave Spear and Persephone Spear. It might have been supposed that this young couple were desperately transcribing every detail of the late Rector's will; but this would have been an erroneous supposition. The papers which lay before them had been extracted from a battered leather case which now reposed on the carpet at their feet. The calculations upon which they were so absorbingly engaged, and which entailed the passing across the little table of all manner of pencil scrawls, had not the very remotest connection with what Mr. Didlington was reading with such careful and explanatory unction; unless indeed all human activities of a revolutionary character are to be regarded as having a relation lo the rights of property.

Persephone Spear and her husband had in fact just come from a communistic meeting at Leeds and were proceeding to another one at Norwich before returning to Bristol where they lived. This matter of consigning Persephone's grandfather to his native Norfolk clay would not have allured them from a mile off if it had not been for the fact that there was the possibility of a strike just then at one of Philip's Somersetshire factories. Feeling a family interest in this event they had naturally got into touch with the leaders of the strike and were doing their best not only to give the event a communistic turn but also to use the accident of their relationship with him to win concessions from Philip

It was a faint amusement to Miss Elizabeth, even in the midst of her sad thoughts, to observe how curiously unlike each other these two young revolutionaries were, and yet what a perfect unanimity existed between them. Spear was a short, humorous, broad-faced youth, with closely cropped fair hair and small, merry, blue eyes; while Percy was a tall, lanky maid of a brownish, gipsy-like complexion and with a mop of dusky curls.

Mr. Philip Crow himself had been, until the lawyer actually commenced reading, moving, like the energetic diplomat he was, from one to another of all these relatives; and even now, while everybody else was seated, he stood with alert, polite attention, leaning against the side of the big window with his back to the lawn and keeping his eyes fixed upon the old-world physiognomy of Mr. Anthony Didlington. No one could have denied to Philip Crow the epithet of handsome. He was indeed the only thoroughly good-looking one of all the assembled relatives; but his good looks were attended with so little self-consciousness and were so completely subordinate to his formidable character that they played a very minor part in the effect he produced. The man drove himself—you could see that in his hawk's nose, his compressed lips, his narrowed eyelids, his twitching brows—but he drove others yet more inflexibly, as was apparent from the roving intensity of his grey eyes, the eyes of a pilot, a harpooner, a big-game hunter—in a word, of a Norman adventurer who took, kept, organised, constructed; and who moulded sans pitie weaker natures to his far-sighted purpose.

John and Mary were so absorbed in whispering to each other as first one memory and then another stole into their minds out of the aura of that old room, some associated with the view outside the window, some with the furniture, some with the figures of their grandparents, that they had little attention to spare for any of the rest of the company. It is true that every now and then John did cast a swift, foxy glance, past the bowed heads of the two revolutionaries, at that great parchment document, with its official red seals, that Mr. Didlington held as reverently as a priest holds the Gospels at Mass. These hungry, furtive glances were the tribute he paid to all those excited expectations of incredible legacies, discussed at so many rue Grimoire suppers with Lisette and Pierre. But these greedy thoughts came quickly and went quickly! The seductive softness of Mary's long limbs, as she sat with crossed legs and clasped hands staring gravely at his face, made his already achieved good luck more precious than any ecclesiastical bequest.

It really seemed interminable, the list of plots and parcels of good English ground, inhabited and uninhabited, which, in various portions of Norfolk, William Crow had inherited from his thrifty yeoman ancestors. Still it went on drawing itself out, this protracted list; and as yet no hint had appeared as to who was going to be the gainer by all this accumulation of properties, of which apparently the dead man had an undisputed right of free disposal.

The wind had quite dropped now. The shadows on the lawn were darker and colder. The few yellow dandelions that had escaped the gardener's shears had closed themselves up and looked —as dandelions do when near sunset—forlorn, impoverished, empty of all glory. A pallid radiance alternated with velvet-black shadows upon the trunk of the cedar; and over the daffodils in the grass and over the hyacinths in the flower-beds a peculiar chilliness, rising from a large hidden pond beyond the field, and not yet palpable enough to take the form of vapour, moved slowly from the edge of the distant shrubbery towards the house. Philip's thoughts were like far-flung hooks piercing the gills of some monstrous Fate-Leviathan that he had resolved to harness to his purpose. He visualised his factory at Wookey Hole. He visualised those stalactites and stalagmites in the famous caves there and saw them lit with perpetual electricity. He remembered how he had stood alone there once by the edge of that sublerra-nean river flowing under the Witch's Rock and how he had felt a sensation of power down there beyond anything he had ever known. “These Norwich-investments are nothing,” he thought, “these over-taxed properties are nothing. The three big mortgages are the thing! Forty thousand they'd sell for. He's left them to me—I feel it, I sense it, I know it. Besides, he promised Grandmother. He confessed that to me himself. What a good thing he died when he did! Never again shall I have to listen to that voice of his reading Lycidas. Old epicure! I can see him now, putting cream into his porridge and looking out so voluptuously across his garden! Living for his sensations! That's what he did, all his days. Putting cream into his porridge, reading his poetry, and living for his sensations. What a life for a grown man! The life of a frog in a lily-pond. Aunt Elizabeth is sorry now he's dead. But she didn't like it when Johnny Geard became the favourite. She very quickly cleared out. He must have fancied himself a lot over that. Must have thought he was converting a Methodist to the true doctrines. Old fantastical-brained, crochetty ass! I shall rebuild the Wookey Hole plant entirely. That'll take about ten thousand. That will leave thirty thousand to play with. And by God! I'll play with it. Four thousand would take electricity beyond the actual known limits of every one of those caves. I'll do the plant for ten thousand and spend five on the caves. With five thousand I could electrify the bowels of the Mendips!” What Philip felt at that second of time when he imagined himself with all that electric power at his disposal, standing among those prehistoric stalactites, would be hard to put into rational human speech. The driimming of a meteorite travelling through space would best express it “I ... I ... I . . . riding on electricity -••I--. I. ..I--, grasping electricity , , . I , , , I . .. I . . . alone . . . all-powerful . . . under the Mendips . . . letting loose my will upon Somerset ... my factories above . . . my electricity beneath. . . . I . . . I , . , Philip Crow . . . planting my will upon the future . . . moulding men . . . dominating Nature.”