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“He ought to be in the shop by this time,” she thought. “It must be nearly ten o'clock.”

The sudden opening of the street door made her swing round. It made her heart give a wild jump. The figure who entered was Red Robinson.

The man gave Cordelia a nervous nod; but he neither took off his cap, nor offered her his hand, nor even closed the shop door.

“I'm looking for his Worship,” he said, with a sneer upon the syllables “Worship.” “ 'E's not at 'ome. 'E's not at Town-5A11. 'E's not at 'is Hoffice. Where his 'is Worship? That's what I want to know. I've got somethink himportant to harx 'im.”

“Can I give my father any message. Red?” asked Cordelia. “Hell no doubt be home for dinner . . . our mid-day dinner, you know, Red.”

The man hesitated.

“Well! You might tell him that I'll say nothing more to that Morgan woman; since that his 'is Worship's pleasure. Nothing more to 'er, tell 5im; and hall shall be has 'e wishes!”

Cordelia bowed gravely. “Surely, Red, surely! Yes, I'll certainly tell Father that. You'll say no more to the Morgan woman according as my father wishes.”

Red nodded, took out his pipe and lit it in the doorway, and then cleared off.

When Cordelia turned round after his departure, there was Mr. Evans standing before her. Mr. Evans looked at her in astonishment; as well he might. She was not only prettier than he had ever seen her; she was much better dressed. Cordelia had in fact gone with Crummie to Wollop's three days before—a thing which she had done only two or three times in their life—and bad delighted her good-natured sister by the unusual interest she had shown in the new Easter display. The ex-Mayor himself had come out of his self-appointed cage to wait upon the supposedly rich daughters of his ambiguous successor; and both girls had done all they could to soothe what they felt must be his deeply wounded feelings.

Crummie had positively forced Cordelia to buy a really becoming costume, and since their father had given the girls a hint that he wished them “to deck themselves out well and do credit to their mother,” this costume, including a specially graceful and very ladylike hat, now showed Cordelia, as the golden-moted rays surrounded her figure, to an advantage that surprised and bewildered Mr. Evans.

The beautiful April weather—for seldom had Glastonbury known the approach of a more auspicious Easter—had quickened the blood and heightened the colour of Mr. Geard's eldest child. Ever since she had put on this dark-blue, charmingly cut dress, and this neat, grey coat with a gentian-blue lining, the girl had felt as if she were a different person. A faint sense of spiritual shame at her own unexpected pleasure in these new clothes heightened the charm of her manner as she now talked to her fiance; gave her, in fact, an air of virginal shyness and timorous self-consciousness which Mr. Evans had never seen in her before.

The boniness of her rather haggard face, the height of her rather sullen forehead, the forward-drooping tilt of her awkward shoulders—all these things seemed mitigated to a point where they almost became the interesting characteristics of a woman of original distinction.

For some reason—better understood doubtless by the Nietz-schean young man, who was Mr. Wollop's buyer, than by Mr. Evans or the young lady herself—the coat-lining, and the blue dress with its thin braid of Brussels lace, when she threw the coat open, made the skin that covered the girl's collarbones seem as satiny and white as the sweet flesh of any much more favoured daughter of Eve.

Whether from pure shyness or whether some subtle feminine instinct warned her to be careful at this important crisis in her life, Cordelia refused to do more than throw her cloak back as she took the seat in the rear of the shop offered her by her lover. Mr. Evans hovered over her there and exchanged casual unimportant remarks with her about he scarcely knew what, while his burning eyes, flashing forth from beneath his bushy eyebrows, devoured this little expanse of feminine whiteness. Something like a fresh-water stream of quite new feelings towards this quiet girl surged through the man's poisoned and brackish senses. With an interior movement of his will—and the dire necessity of his distorted nature had endowed Mr. Evans' will with engines of iron—he now closed down a formidable mental portcullis upon his dark congenital perversity. Not a trickle, not a drop, from that deadly sluice must be allowed to poison this new feeling.

For he recognised in a flash that if he could, at that very moment hustle his guest off to his unmade bed upstairs, it would not be a penance at all but a spontaneous pleasure to embrace her there. This was the first time in Mr. Evans' life that such a normal and natural impulse had ever come upon him. And it remained. Yes! It remained at the background of all the torrent of words which he now poured out, in spasmodic spurts of volcanic agitation, at the back of that sun-illumined shop.

“Pve been going on reading Dante, Cordy,—how sweet you do look today!—and I tell you, my dear, he's the only one of the great poets who really, to my thinking, understands life. Life's a war-to-the-death, Cordelia,—that's the truth, my precious!—between the Spirits of Good and Evil. These Spirits are everywhere. They are encountering each other in every crevice of consciousness and on every plane of Being. Life springs from their conflict. Life is their conflict. If the Spirit of Good conquered entirely— as one day I hope it will—the whole teeming ocean of life would dry up. There would be no more life!”

Cordelia watched him carry off his breakfast things—for he had evidently risen hurriedly, for some purpose, from his tea and rolls—and lay them in a row on a little shelf above his gas-stove. A dedicated stream of sunlight, thick and mellow like sunlight in a monk's cell, kept turning his Roman profile, with its great hooked nose and long upper lip into a dusky bronze image that flickered vaguely before her, first on one hand, then on the other, as she listened and pondered in a passive trance of content.

“This is happiness,” she thought to herself. 'This is what Crummie must often have known." And a great wave of pity ransacked her heart on behalf of all the old maids in Glastonbury who had no man; no hulking, blundering Incompetent, fumbling helplessly with truculent inanimates! Oh, how easily she could have done what he was even now so gropingly trying to do! And how near she had come herself never to have had one of these creatures wTho could talk so excitingly and—crash went one of Mr. Evans' plates upon the floor!—could find the task of clearing a table so pathetically difficult.

He came back to her side now, lugging a great carved armchair after him, and upon this throne-like object he compelled her to sit, while he himself took possession of the small, upright Sheraton chair which she vacated.

“What none of you people in Glastonbury seem to understand,” Mr. Evans went on now, “is that this place is charged and soaked with a desperate invisible struggle.”

“Isn't there the same confusion,” Cordelia dared to remark in a low voice, “in ourselves?”

“Certainly there is!” Mr. Evans cried, leaning forward over the girl's blue skirt and pressing the palm of his left hand upon the arm-knob of her antique throne.

“There's the whole pit of Hell in ourselves, fire, smoke, sulphur, pitch, stench, burning! Some souls have a firm floor, Cordelia, that anyone can stamp on and it makes no difference. But other souls have trapdoors in their floors leading down to . . . to . . . to places unthinkable!”

The girl's mouth was a little open and the black pupils of her eyes had grown round and large. She was sitting up very straight in that antique chair with her gloved hands—he hadn't thought of asking her to take her gloves off and she had hesitated to do so lest it should seem a too familiar gesture—holding tight to the wooden arms; but there was a space of several inches, between her hand and his fierce grip upon the arm-knob.

“I'm an unhappy man, Cordelia,” he whispered hoarsely.

Her eyelids contracted. A faint return of the exultant strength which had seized her that night on Chalice Hill shivered up through her rigid body. Now was the moment to let him know how he could depend on her—how she was ready to sacrifice everything for him! But fear and shyness made her numb, mute, helpless.

“Unhappy,” he repeated in an almost inaudible voice.

Her bloodless lips moved. She formed the words, “I'm so sorry,” but whether they reached him or not she could not tell.

“I've felt things, IVe done things,” he burst out, “in my life, which have put me . . .”—he drew his hand away from the arm of her big chair and leaned back, making the inlaid woodwork of the delicate piece of carpentry he sat on creak ominously— “put me outside the palel”

Then thrusting his hands deep in his pockets he gave vent to two unpleasant emissions of sound which he meant to be a cynical laugh.

“Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased, Cordelia?”

The girl responded—it was a sign of more devotion than he realised—by slipping off her new jacket and struggling to pull off her new gloves.

“I am sorry . . . Owen” she murmured.

The way she said “Owen” tickled the fancy of Mr. Evans and he smiled at her grimly.

'“I know you are, my dear,” he said. '*I would have told you about this weeks ago, if I could. There's no earthly reason why I shouldn't tell you everything . . . except . . . that / cant?*

“I am sorry . . . Owen,” she repeated, folding back with frowning intensity the second of the two gloves and finally pulling it off and laying it on the chair by her side.

“Why I should have ever been born like I am,” said Mr. Evans, “is what I can't understand. But that's what the worst men whoVe ever lived might have said.”

He got up from his seat and began walking up and down the small space at the end of the shop. Every time he swung round he looked at the handle of the door leading to the room below. How often had he struggled against the irresistible temptation to turn that handle and steal a few feverish moments of reading from that bookl

“Cordelia, do you think there are forms of evil so horrible that nothing can wash them out?”

The girl was sitting sideways now in her dusky gilded throne. A long quivering stream of reddish sunlight fell full upon her profile and gave to all its eccentricities an emphasis that was startling;

“Wash . . . them . • . out?” she repeated stupidly.

“I mean, do you think there are certain things anyone can do . . . cruel, abominable things . . . which bring in their train undying remorse? Listen, Cordelia! Do you think wThen Christ sweated that bloody sweat it talks about, He felt the weight of things like that? Not what He'd done himself, of course; but what, before He died, He had to take on Himself? Shall I tell you something, Cordy? I can tell you that much anyway . . . John Crow has asked me to play the Christ in your father's Pageant; and I said I would, if he'd let me be really tied to a Cross. You can see why I said that, Cordelia, can't you. It'll be hard to bear”; he emitted those same unpleasant guttural sounds again that he evidently supposed resembled a brutal guffaw, “it'll probably be more painful than I've any idea of; but I thought I'd realise in that way how He really did take such things on Him.”

“It has been terrible for you, Owen, all this that you have gone through,” she said. “But I can't believe that there are any things so awful that Christ cannot pardon them.”

He stopped in his walk and faced her, his hands still deep in his pockets.

“People . . . don't . . • seem ... to realise,'' he said, ”what Evil is. They don't . . . seem ... to realise how far it goes down! It has holes . . . that go down . . . beyond the mind . . . beyond the reason . . ? beyond all we can think of! Something comes up from these holes that gives you power when you're in certain . . ? in certain moods . . . and it's then that you feel things . . . and . . . Do Things“—his voice rose here to such a pitch that the girl started up and made a movement of her hand towards him—”which nothing in Nature can forgive!"

He moved backward away from her now with a lurching motion until his shoulder struck against a tall walnut-wood bureau. The shock of this seemed to calm him a little.

“Of course,” he murmured, turning his back to her and passing his fingers up and down along the bureau's edge, “Christ is outside Nature; and that's my chance! He's outside, isn't He, Cordelia . . . outside altogether?”

Cordelia did somehow find the courage now to move up close to him and lay a nervous hand on the sleeve of his coat. He started at her touch and the expression of his face frightened her; but he must have pressed at once in the dark machinery of his mind one of those iron engines of his morbidly active will and it was with quite a courtly gesture that he raised her hands to his lips.

“You're sweeter to me than I deserve, my dear,” he said gently. “I wish indeed, for your sake, I were a very different person.”

“I am quite happy with you as you are, Owen,” whispered Cordelia with a beating heart. “Oh, why,” she cried in all her nerves, “oh, why doesn't he take me in his arms?”

While these events were occurring in Number Two's shop, Number Two himself, namely Mr. Bartholomew Jones, already a little recovered from the extraction of what Penny Pitches called s “sisty” in his lower regions, was out of the hospital for a morning's drive. One of the doctors had offered to take the old man wiih him on a trip to Godney; but had dropped him instead for an hour's visit to the house of his aged crony, Abel Twig. Here at the door of the latter's woodshed, the two old gentlemen were exchanging comments upon life, just as they had been accustomed to do for the last fifty years.

“Me grand-daughter Sally do din me ears with talk about our new Mayor. The gal gives herself as much airs as if she were a she-mayor; and yet 'tis only because of her being their maid-of-all! 'Tis wondrous, Abel, how they pettykits do take on about Public Doings. In them old days, brother, Yivas upon pasties and apple turnovers and sech-like that their mindies rinned.”

“Fill up thee pipe, Bart; fill up thee pipe and think no more o' such pitiful goings-on,” said Mr. Twig firmly. “ 'Tis thoughts such as these thoughts what bring poor buggers like we into hospitals and infirmaries. When sun do shine and birds do zing, 'tis best to stretch out legs, brother, and hummy and drummy!”