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His hard grey eyes began to soften a little and his gaze, leaving Mr. Didlington's face, turned itself towards vacancy.

“I shall have a completely new sort of boat made, to explore that subterranean river,” he thought, “flatter than a barge, lighter than a canoe. I'll build an electric engine for it and I'll have myself floated under the Witch's Rock and I'll make them leave me there; and I'll have that feeling. . . . Ill make it work too, I'll have water power for my plant run by the buried river in the heart of the Mendips! I'll electrify the caves of the Druids. I'll carry electricity deeper under the earth than anyone's ever done. How slowly this old ass reads!”

But Miss Elizabeth Crow, staring sometimes into the fire and sometimes out of the big window across the lawn, thought to herself,* “I should have had an easier life if I'd put up with Johnny Geard and stayed with Father.” She remembered how she had first seen this Glastonbury ex-preacher whose mystical ideas got such a fatal hold on William Crow's mind and on William Crow's heart. She had been visiting her mother in Switzerland; and when she came back there he was—the Somersetshire revivalist, installed in Northwold Rectory! “How his black eyes gleamed as he listened to Father's morning prayers! The man was fascinating in his own way. I can't blame Father for liking him.” She could hear now her father's resonant voice repeating the great poetical chapters in Isaiah. “Comfort ye, comfort ye, my people, saith your God. Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem and cry unto her, that her warfare is accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned; for she hath received of the Lord's hands double for all her sin!” And she could hear this charlatan interrupt—an unheard-of thing for a servant to do!—and beg for another chapter of sacred rhetoric.

Tilly Crow's mind was neither conjuring up large legacies nor brooding over ancient grievances. It was occupied entirely with minute problems connected with the larder, the pantry, the kitchen, in her own home at Glastonbury. There was a certain shelf in the pantry that her housemaid always kept too crowded. Tilly Crow could see now a particular stream of light in which the sun motes were wont to flicker when she entered that pantry after breakfast. This light always fell upon a suspended dishcloth, different from the rest, with a little green border, which she kept for drying her best china cups herself when they had visitors. Then her mind left the pantry and made a journey of about a dozen feet to the larder. Here she saw with abominable vividness a bluebottle fly—she maintained a special and constant warfare against these—walking along the edge of a shelf where the butter and cheese were kept Not being able to endure this image with equanimity she gave a sharp little shake of her head to drive it away and as Mr. Didlington began a long list of freeholds in the parish of Thorpe her adventurous mind took a daring leap to her Glastonbury drawing-room where it concentrated upon the faded pink ottoman wherein she kept her wools. ll must re-line the ottoman,'* she said to herself. “There's that rent that Elizabeth's cat made. It always bothers me to see it. How sentimental Elizabeth looks, staring out of the window! Oh, I hope the Canon has left her enough money to go and live by herself in some nice seaside place!” At this point in Tilly Crow's thoughts there came an image that she would have been very reluctant to put into words; but as a mere image in the void—brought to her by some housemaid of the air upon a silver tray—she gave herself up to it. This was the image of a solitary cup of tea carried up to her, with her letters, by Emma the cook, during a paradisiac holiday, when Philip—such was Tilly's furthest reach of felicity—had gone to stay for a whole fortnight with Aunt Elizabeth, at that pleasant seaside place!

But what was this? What words of fatal significance had fallen from the lips of Mr. Didlington? By what incantation had this roomful of grown-up people been incontinently jerked upon their feet, protesting, exclaiming, jeering, enquiring, denouncing, arguing; and by no means speaking gently of their Grandfather Crow who, for all that he was one of the chief causes of their being alive upon the earth, seemed to have turned into a deliberate enemy?

“Does it mean that none of us get a penny—not even Philip?” whispered Mary to John.

“Not a penny,” the man from Paris answered. “And what's more, Mary, I'll have to borrow ten shillings from you to get to Glastonbury.”

“You'll want more than that,” she returned gravely.

“No, I shan't. I'm going to walk. Ten shillings is what I want. Not more, not less. But I want it from you and you'd better give it me now if you've got your purse; for they're terribly excited and it's best to be on the safe side.”

Mary fixed a very straight look upon him at this. But seeing that he was perfectly serious she moved back a little towards the window and nodded to him to follow her.

“How much money have you got left?” Mary whispered. He searched his pockets thoroughly and produced three shillings and fourpence. This sum he held out to her in his two hands as if she had demanded it of him. She shook her head. “Put it back,” she said. “I'd better get some more for you. You can't walk all that way.* I'm sure Aunt Elizabeth------”

He pulled her nearer to him, interrupting her words. The massive green curtain on the left of the window—for the winter curtains had not been changed yet—hung in bulging folds against his shoulder. Mary long afterward remembered how exactly like a certain Venetian picture she had seen somewhere his refined rogue's face looked against that background. “I'm not going to take a penny from anybody but you!” he whispered fiercely, with a malicious gleam in his eye. “I'll find you out at Glastonbury in a week or so—not longer than two weeks anyway—and then we'll see. I may sponge upon you like the devil then” he added, giving the girl a quick, searching look. “I have sponged on girls before. It's a way of life that seems to suit me!”

Mary showed her strong white teeth in a schoolgirl grin. Turning her back to the room she drew out her purse and took from it three half-crowns, a florin and a sixpence. “Miss Drew,” she remarked, “doesn't pay very much. Philip doesn't give tips either. Aunt Elizabeth gave me this for pocket-money.”

It would have been clear enough to any close observer that Mary derived an exultant happiness from handing over her pocket-money to John in this childish manner. It would also have been clear that John's feelings were equally those of a romantic lover and a sly, unscrupulous tramp.

“I'll ask Aunt Elizabeth if you can't sleep here tonight,” whispered Mary, as they turned away from the darkening window.

He made a wry face at her. “Don't you dare!” he breathed. “I've got more than three shillings without touching your ten and I've left my bag at the Inn. I'll make them give me a room and breakfast for two nights for that—you'll see! I want to go with you to the big river tomorrow. We never went there together.”

Mary got red with excitement. “We did, John! You've forgotten but I remember. We did just once!”

Their dialogue was interrupted by Philip's voice which was not raised, but which was lowered to such a key of indrawn intensity that it compelled attention.

He was now standing with his back to the fire, fronting Mr. Didlington, who, with his fingers inserted between the loose plages of this calamitous will, swayed heavily and limply before him, like an obsequious but surly seneschal whose account has proved faulty.

“The whole of . . . this . . . forty thousand . . . left absolutely to this man . . . and no chance ... of legal action . . . that ... in short ... is the situation?”

Mr. Didlington began murmuring something in a husky, injured voice; but it was only the word “legacies” that reached the ears of John and Mary.

“Damn your legacies!” said Philip in the same tone. “Two hundred a year from the Norwich property to my aunt; and a hundred in cash to the servants. That's all of your precious legacies there are. The maddening thing is that it was Tilly and I who introduced this sly dog to Grandfather.”

His voice changed a little and he looked towards his wife.

Tilly Crow had drawn up her thin legs in the great arm-chair and, with her hands clasped so violently in her lap that the knuckles showed white, stared at him with frightened eyes.

“Where is this thief, Tilly?” he said, in a much gentler voice. “Where is this holy rascal who has fooled us all?” The fact that he had displayed self-control enough to speak in a half-humorous tone was in itself sufficient to bring about the recovery of his equanimity. “Why,” he finally remarked, looking round with the air of a monarch addressing his courtiers after the loss of a battle, ''why doesn't someone fetch this good, religious man and let me offer him our united congratulations!"

“The furniture,” murmured Tilly. “Did he say the furniture was to be divided equally? Does that mean, Philip, that we can't have the silver with your grandmother's crest on it? Ask them, Philip, ask them now! They will give us the silver, won't they? And the linen? We don't want any more furniture, Philip, but these girls must let me have the linen! Tell them we don't want any heavy furniture, Philip. Tell them we want the silver and linen.”

Aunt Elizabeth herself rose heavily from her seat now. Her thoughts had been wandering away to Glastonbury, where thirty years ago she had been so fond of the youthful Vicar of the place, who had jilted her. to marry a maid-servant. She completely disregarded Tilly and addressed herself to her nephew. “You are thinking only of your own affairs, Philip,” she said sternly. She looked at him, as she spoke, without a trace of the respectful awe into which he had bullied the others. “Why don't you and Tilly congratulate me on my two hundred a year?”

There was a weight of character in Aunt Elizabeth when she was on her feet and confronting her nephew that enabled her to reduce his importance and to reduce his loss of forty thousand pounds! Mary pinched John's arm with delight and whispered to him something he could not catch. It was from the other young couple in the room, however, that the next word came.

“Percy and I congratulate you, Aunt,” cried Mr. Spear.

“Yes, yes,” echoed Persephone, straightening her shoulders and tossing her head, “and we hope you'll come out of the enemy's camp now and listen to wisdom.”

Miss Crow moved towards them, attracted by something so kind in their tone that it surprised and disarmed her. “Pm in no enemy's camp, Percy,” she murmured, putting her arm round the tall girl's waist “I am an old-fashioned woman, and very fond of my dear nephew and niece. I know nothing about politics—any more than Mary does,” she added, making an instinctive movement to bring the four young people together. John and Mary did approach her.

“If there is to be anybody's wisdom thrust upon Aunt Elizabeth,” John threw in, “I think mine would suit her best.”

“What do you mean by that, Mr. Crow?” said young Spear, in an argumentative tone.

“Yes, what do you mean, John?” repeated Persephone. “You don't mean that Dave and I would try and browbeat Aunt Elizabeth, to force her to see the light, do you?”

“The light, the light, the light, the light!” cried John suddenly with a convulsed face.

Aunt Elizabeth unconsciously started back a pace or two, dragging Persephone, whose waist she still held, back with her; for there was something about Percy's slender figure that provoked people to touch her and made it difficult to let her go.

But John's face smoothed itself out in a second and the humblest apologies flowed from him. “It's my French mischief coming out, Dave Spear,” he said. “It's all acquired cynicism. Really, I love to think that there are people with strong convictions, people who know they are right, like you and Cousin Philip.”

Philip's own voice broke into their talk at this moment. It had not failed to strike him that Aunt Elizabeth and the four young cousins, in their obvious indifiference to the grotesque event of forty thousand pounds passing from the Crow family to the Geard family, had succeeded in ostracising him in a sort of moral solitude. He and his wife might go on quarrelling with Mr. Didlington over this fiasco. The others were civilised people, prepared to take a mere financial blow with becoming urbanity!

“Don't lump me and Dave Spear together,” he interrupted, pushing his way between Aunt Elizabeth and Mary with jocular bluster. “Percy would never cook him another meal if she thought we had anything in common. To my pretty Perse I shall never be anything but a bloated capitalist, shall I?” And he also, just as Aunt Elizabeth had done, put his arm round the tall girl's slender waist.

“Cousin Tilly,” cried Dave Spear, with a schoolboy grin on his broad countenance, “come and stop Philip from flirting with my wife!”

But Mrs. Crow, who had just rung the bell and had had a long whispered conversation with the maid who answered it, was herself at that moment upbraiding Mr. Didlington in a plaintive but penetrating, voice. “She says that horrible man departed yesterday from Glastonbury. I suppose both of you knew that Grandfather had left him everything.” She paused, and then turning to her husband, “Tea's ready in the dining-room, Philip,” she said.

The lawyer made his way to the group in the centre of the room and allowed his answer to Tilly's shrewish attack to be a general professional reply to them all.

“It is true,” he said, “that Mr. Geard was aware, just as I was aware, of the late Canon's intentions; and as his family live in Glastonbury it was natural and indeed suitable that he should proceed there at once to acquaint them with this very considerable bequest.”

“Well, Didlington,” returned Philip, looking round at the company,*“! hope you will do my wife the pleasure of letting her pour out tea for you? Shall we go into the dining-room? Will you follow Mrs. Crow, Didlington?”

He opened the door and they all trooped out into the passage. Down this they moved, past the broad staircase where the walls were hung with some really valuable oil paintings selected by William Crow's great-uncle. Not far from this staircase was the front door, leading—through a pleasant conservatory—out into the courtyard. It was through this door rather than any other that Mr. Didlington now hastened to pass, picking up his hat from a marble table that offered itself conveniently to his attention.