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"She needn't tell her auntie nothink, Sir, need she?'' threw in the considerate Sally.

But the problem of “Auntie, out to Greylands” was at that moment a little too complicated for Sam's wits. “Plenty of time, Tossie, plenty of time for all such matters,” was all he could say. “And now I must go down; and Sally shall stay with you. You feel much better now, don't you?” He rose to his feet and turned to the girl in the gilded chair. “You can lock the door if you like, Sally, and not open it till my father comes up. Goodbye, Tossie. Everything's going to be all right.”

It was nine o'clock when Sam went back to the museum and he found the company grown much more lively than it wTas when he left the scene. The extreme heat of the room, the guttering of so many candles, the mingling of so many steamy and unctuous smells, the loud boisterousness of the voices, all combined to make him feel a little sick in his stomach. Instead of returning, therefore, to Crummie's side, he went straight up to his father. “I hate to desert you, Dad,” he whispered, “but I must get out for a breath of air. I left Sally to look after Tossie and told her to lock the door till you came. They've been bullying her already. It's that chap Barter, I suppose. But it's only beginning— I don't know! She's a nice little thing, but very simple—terribly simple. But he's a fairly decent chap. He won't marry her, of course; but he'll fork up. He won't run away.”

“You do look white, me boy,” responded Mat Dekker with much concern. “Here—drink a drop of this! Emma rescued it for me from old Weatherwax. This beer and this port together are enough to upset anyone. This is my father's stuff.” And he handed his son a wine glass of richly fragrant, neat brandy.

Sam drank off about half of what his father had offered him. “Finish it yourself, Dad,” he murmured affectionately. “It'll be our loving cup. I'll go out for a bit now. I'll be all right. Louie and Lily are going to stay to help Penny, aren't they? Yes, I thought so. Well, 111 be back when the decks are clear, Dad. Don't worry.” He left the room without a thought of Crummie. In his haste to escape he did not give her so much as a nod.

The girl watched him through the half-open door putting on his overcoat. Her soft cheeks were tightly drawn, her white teeth were biting her underlip; her large eyes were wild and dry and miserable. This was the end of her chance that he might take her home! Where was he going? On what errand had his father sent him? She had watched their conversation just now and had not missed their affectionate look when they pledged each other in the same cup. Probably Mat Dekker had sent him to fetch the doctor to see Tossie Stickles! Crummie had heard of Tossie's fainting-fit. Indeed she had listened on all sides to many unsympathetic explanations of that event. And where was their own Sally? She must be upstairs with the sick girl. Oh, what a difficult world it was! What a world of harsh, stabbing, scraping, jarring events; when everything could be so lovely!

When Sam opened the front door without a thought of his supper companion and walked quickly down the moonlit drive, not a breath of air was stirring. Delicate fragrances rose and sank around him as if they had been aroused and as if they had been suppressed by their own mysterious volition. There were two big lilac bushes and several clumps of white peonies on the edge of the dew-wet grass; and near the drive gate was an ancient red-blossoming hawthorn tree. There must have been scents from all these upon the air; but what Sam felt in his troubled fancy was that the tormented body of his Redeemer Himself, bathed, in its nakedness and its blood, by the waves of the cool moonlight, was diffusing this almost mortal sweetness through the atmosphere ol the night. Once out in the road this fancy of his took to itself a more intimate aspect. He began to feel as if this tremendous shadow over Glastonbury of the martyred God-Man were calling upon him to fulfil some purpose, to make some decision. He crossed the road to the base of that high wall of the Abbey Grounds over which hung the tall elm trees that from his earliest childhood had been associated with certain turning-points of his life. He turned to the left now and walking sometimes in the roadway, and sometimes on the uneven grass under the wall, he followed the outskirts of Miss Drew's garden until he reached the entrance to Abbey House. In his mind he thought now: 'Til go as far as Tithe Barn and then swing round to the right, where there are those open fields on the east side of Bere Lane.'" But just at this point he heard several footsteps and voices behind him and he lessened his pace to let these unknown persons pass.

While so large a group of the respectable proletariat of Glastonbury was listening to the rumbling bass tones of Isaac Weather-wax, John Crow was making love to Mary Crow in his snug room in Northload Street.

Panting hard and fast, in an interval of his absorbed and vicious love-making, while the girl, with dishevelled hair and rumpled garments, leaned back with closed eyes in his leather arm-chair, John Crow opened the window and gazed out over the w ater-meadows. How he did drink up those damp odours of water-mint and watercress, of reed beds and mossy hatches, of dew-soaked grasses and river mud! The moonlight was flooding everything that night; but it seemed to irradiate with some especial kind of benediction those vast level fields, where the ancient Lake Village had been, and which John had crossed that very morning with little Nelly Morgan at his heels. By leaning far out of his window he could just make out a little red light to the north of the Lake Village Field which may well have shone from the upper window of Backwear Hut where at this very second Abel Twig, seated on his iron bed, was pulling off his trousers. Whether it came from Abel's bedroom or not, there was something in the sight of that little red light, shining across the dew-soaked, moonlit expanse of fields and ditches, that thrilled John with a keen ecstasy. He turned to give a swift glance at the girl behind him, and the look of her figure as she rested there, her dark eyelashes lying softly on her white cheeks, her long legs outstretched from beneath her disarranged and disordered clothes, her slender arms raised up and her sturdy, competent fingers clasped behind her dusky head, increased his sensation of predatory rapture. “I won't compete with anyone,” he thought. “I won't fight these monkish phantasms with material weapons. I'll pillage the place with my wits. I'll snatch the beauty of their pastures from them, while I lay bare their hocus-pocus. My girl is enough for me! Her body is more delicious than all their fancies. I'll drain up the magic of this spring night, and of every night, as it sinks down on these pollards and poplars and reedy ditches; but Til fight these dead saints with a devilish cunning beyond anything they've ever encountered! I'll ransack the beauty of their moons and their marshes. I'll drink it up! I'll drain it to the dregs; I'll penetrate all their secrets too! I'll twist like a serpent into their deepest souls! Ill become what they are; and then I'll betray them! And all the while I'll make love to Mary. Mary belongs to me. She belongs to me as much as my hazel-stick belongs to me. Oh, how sweet she looks over there at this moment. Those enchanting knees are my girl's. Those maddeningly sweet ankles are my girl's ankles. That white neck is my girl's neck. From head to foot my girl belongs to me. I've eaten her up tonight! I've eaten her up just as I've drunk up this moonlight floating over Lake Village Field.”

As he gazed at Mary, what John noticed now was that one of the ribbons that held up her slip across her shoulders was hanging loose and exposed. This minute and trifling disorder about the girl's person was more provocative to his senses than any drastic disarray could have been. It seemed pathetic that a little thing such as this, so natural to her, and which she had refastened so many times with her needle on its return from the laundress should be so disturbing to him and should excite in him such a triumph of possession. He pressed the palms of his hands against the windowsill and breathed intoxicating draughts of what seemed to him like melted moonlight. “I have possessed her.” he thought, “far more completely by making love to her like I ha\e than I ever could by going to the normal extreme. It is her soul I have taken. Yes! her nerves, her veins, her fibres. I have possessed her so completely that henceforth she will be compelled to dwell within my soul. Wherever I go she will go! Whatever I hate, she will hate. 0 great Stones of Stonehenge, let me keep her, let me hold her, let me possess her, for years and years and years as I do at this moment, for this is the secret of life!”

The natural reaction from this ecstasy of his came only too quickly. At an attempt he made to renew his love-making Mary-grew touchy and even cold. They drewT away from each other and some bitter words passed between them.

John said to himself in his heart:—“This is your girl, this girl will always be your girl. What is the use of quarrelling with her?” But although his deeper nature knew that he was making a fool of himself, knew that he would regret it afterward, his superficial nerves seemed to take delight in contending with her and he now proceeded to carry on this tiresome dispute, in a peevish, querulous, grievanced, complaining whine. “You know perfectly well, Mary, that you've been sulky for the last three wreeks because I've been forced to put off our marriage.”

She really did flash out at him now with a more dangerous glint in her grey eyes than he had ever seen. “You won't . . . find . . . me . . . 'sulky/” she hissed out between her strong, large, white teeth, “ever again . • . on • . . that . . . point • • . my . . . friend!”

“You needn't take me up like that,” he went on more querulously than ever—although in the lower levels of his nature something kept crying out to him—“Stop that, you fool! Stop that now!”—“It's just like a woman to go and bring up a thing like that and get furious about it! You know perfectly well that what I say is true. Why can't you be generous and considerate to a person, when he's worried like I am now with all I've got to think of?”

“No,” she said in a low, hard, cold voice. “I'm an idiot to beg a man to marry me, when he doesn't think enough of our love to stop from calling me sulky when Fm sad at our being separated so long.”

“Mary, you are too absurd! And you know you're being unfair. I'm not accusing you. You take the words out of my mouth. I'm only saying that something's changed in you lately; so that you don't trust me like you used to. Tom was telling me only yesterday what . . . what you said about old Geard's having got me under his------”

“Stop there!” the girl cried, snatching her arm from the mantelpiece and clenching both her hands. “Stop just there! And don't bring other people into this! Oh, I thought ... I thought . . . oh, I never thought,” here her voice did really begin to break, “that we'd be bringing him into our quarrels with each other!”

“Fm not bringing Tom in,” he cried, “and, if I ivere, Tom's a friend of us both, isn't he? But of course that's what you women always do. You can never remain content till a man hasn't a friend left that he can talk to!”

Mary gave him a terrible glance at that, a glance that was as piercing as if she'd thrown a sharp knife at him. She then swung across to the olive-coloured couch and sat down there, desperately and wearily, resting her chin on the palms of her hands and her elbows on her knees.,

John got up from the arm of the leather arm-chair and walking in silence to the window closed it with a bang. He tapped a vicious tattoo with his knuckles upon the very sill that he had gripped so tightly, in a rapture of exultation, so short a time before.

Little did John guess how far from the echoes of their angry quarrel her thoughts had wandered, behind those staring grey eyes, behind that forehead where the dark hair was generally parted so evenly, but where tonight a loose tress of it hung so disorderly. John did at any rate make a kind of movement, however, towards relieving the tension, for he walked across the room to where he had pushed their unwashed tea-pot in a hurry among the glasses on the shelf and taking it up in his hand asked her if she wouldn't help him to wash up before she had to go.

“Why, what on earth's the time?” she asked with a start.

“Oh, about a quarter------” he began. “Who's that?” he cried, for heavy and rapid steps were now heard ascending the stairs.

He had barely time to put down the tea-pot and she barely time to rise from the couch and smooth back the errant iock from off her forehead when, with a couple of loud, easy knocks, such as those that a young collegian might give at a colleague's door on any familiar academic staircase, Tom Barter burst: into the room.

iwHull . . . lo\“ His tone expressed genuine surprise, not un-mingled with a certain dismay at finding his two friends together on Maundy Thursday evening. ”Well! Isn't this splendid, vou two!“ He growled out these words with a certain aplomb as he pulled off his overcoat and cloth cap; but when he added. ”By God! I never guessed I'd kill two such birds with one stone!“ as he accepted a cigarette from Mary's case—f or he did not shake hands with either of them—there was an unmistakable ring of the hollow, propitiatory bonhommie of the manager of a factory about the sound of his wTords. Mary herself hurried to the fire and threw on some more coals. John, having made the visitor sit down in the leather arm-chair, began clattering with* the tumblers on the shelf so that he could reach a bottle placed behind them, and finally, putting three glasses on the tea-table as well as this bottle, cried out in an excited, high-pitched voice, ”Let^s all have a loving-cup. That's the thing! Let's all have a loving-cup! Eh, Cousin? Isn't that an inspiration?"

Mary shot a quick glance at him. He'd never called her “cousin” since that first day when they met at their grandfather's funeral. Was it a token of rejection? Were they to be only cousins henceforward?

But John seemed to be seized with an almost unnatural excitement. He filled up two of the glasses with whiskey and cold wTater but into the third, in place of the water, he poured milk from the milk-jug on the table. “Here are three human beings,” he cried wildly, while Barter watched him with a phlegmatic but indulgent smile, and then turned to Mary with a lift of one of his eyebrows, as much as to say: “We know him, don't we? He's not as crazy as anyone would suppose!”