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“Here are,” John cried out, "three human beings; what they call in France, a situation a trois! Two of us, in this a trois, must, the French think, by a law of Nature, be plotting against the third. They need not consciously be doing this, you understand

They can't help doing it! So now you see—Cousin Mary—so now you see—my dear Tom—why I've filled up one of these glasses with milk. The one with milk is the w^eak one. The one wTith milk is the one that the other two—unconsciously, you understand, always unconsciously,—are plotting against. I hope, by the way, that neither of you loathes milk with whiskey: I rather like it myself. There are the three glasses . . . I'll shuffle them a bit . . . like this. , . . Now do you two, keeping your eyes tight shut, choose a glass . . . and I'll take the one that's left over."

Such was the hypnotism of John's mood, or such was the affectionate indulgence towards him of his friend and his girl, that they obeyed him literally. They both ran their fingers blindly along the edge of the table till they encountered the glasses; then blindly chose one and held the choice high up in the air. “You see! You see!” John cried triumphantly. They certainly did see, when they opened their eyes, that the gl ass left upon the table was the one with milk in it; but they wei'e both so convinced that John had arranged this result that all the portentousness was taken out of it. John swallowed his whiskey and milk in two or three gulps and put down the empty glass. “Come,” he said, “if I'm the wTeak, idiotic fool that you two are plotting against, let me at least enjoy the voluptuousness of it!” And he poured himself out an excessively stiff glass and tossed it off with the same impetuosity.

It soon came to pass that Mary and he were sitting side by side on the olive-green couch, while their guest, with his grey office trousers and striped blue socks very much in evidence, was stretched out in the leather chair.

“I say! But you keep this place pretty hot,” said Mr. Barter brusquely.

“Open the window, John, will you?” said Mary. “It's youi coming in from outside, Tom; but it has got rather warm.” There was an awkward pause while John went to the window.

“It's too warm . . . / think . . * to have a fire at all today,” said Mr. Barter. “I haven't got one at the office; and I've never had one all this winter in my lodging. . . . Oh, yes, I did once and that was when I had a visitor!” As he said this he smiled significantly at John to indicate that this visitor was none other than Mary. Mary knew from the back of Mr. Barter's bead tli^f: ^ \

he and John were exchanging a long look as the latter returned *~^“” from opening the window.

“They have talked about me,” she thought. '“They are alwav? talking about me.”

She and her lover were now seated again side by side on the couch.

“Your lamp is smoking,” said Tom Barter.

“Let it smoke,” murmured John.

But Barter rose from the armchair, went up to the red-shaded lamp, turned it low, and blowing violently down its funnel extinguished it altogether. “You're too fond of red, you two/* he blurted out rudely. ”This room, as I've told John before, is like a damned Chelsea studio."

“You're fairly bullying us tonight, Tom; aren't you?” said Mary.

“He wants to show that our room is as much his as it is ours,” said John. “And so it is, old chap! And so it is! What's ours is our old Tom's, isn't it, Mary?”

“Fm not . . . quite . . . so . . . sure . . . that . . . Tom . . . wants it to be like that,” said Mary slowly as she got up from the couch and went to fetch a third candle. There were two burning on the mantelpiece already. She lighted this third one and laid it on the crumb-strewn table. “Three persons,” she thought, “and three candle-flames.”

There was a long pause; for the same thought had entered all their three heads simultaneously, the awkward, ticklish, embarrassing thought about Barter's leaving Philip. Barter said to himself, “Shall I tell them that I've signed up today with Geard? They both hate Philip; but, after all, they are his cousins; and Fm playing him a dirty trick.” Without putting his feelings into definite expression his treachery to Philip remained in his nerves as an unpleasant taste. What Barter craved for at that minute wTas some humorously cynical talk to encourage him in his betrayal of his employer or at least condone it.

John said to himself, "When is he going to confess he's come over to Geard? It was a bit funny his doing that at Geard's word when he wouldn't do it at mine. Did old Geard bribe him a lot higher than he told me he was going to? Aye! But I'd like to see Philip's face when he hears about it. Pd like to see his face!*'

But Mary thought:—'“I hope old Tom hasn't decided to leave Philip. I don't believe this municipal factory will last. Pm afraid it's only a fad of Geard's, and Geard cannot be Mayor forever. Besides, it will mean that John and Tom will be closer than ever; and my life will never be happy till I've got John to myself.”

Their three pairs of eyes were turned simultaneously to the fire now, where at last there had appeared a solitary tongue of orange-coloured flame dancing up and down on the top of the black coals. And there fell upon them all, at that moment, that mysterious, paralysing quiescence, full of inertia and a strange numbness, which sometimes seizes a group of human consciousnesses when conversation flags. It is an inertia made cubic, so to speak, by being shared. It was, at that second of time, as if the souls of these three East Anglians had suddenly clung together and plunged down the great backward slide of biological evolution. They had become one vegetative soul, these three consciousnesses, weary of their troublesome misunderstandings.

John was the first to shake himself clear of this inertia. He moved to the window and laid his hand on the sill. “Did you hear that?” he said. “That was a bird's cry from the banks of the Brue. I've never heard that cry before. Listen!” John leaned forward as he spoke and stared out through the oblong window-space, on each side of which Mary's rose-coloured curtains—looking as if the mist had dimmed them—wavered slightly in the night air. But the bird cry, if it were a bird cry, was not repeated.

“It must have been a spirit,” said Mary.

“The spirit of one of those old Lake Village men,” said John, “come to warn us three heathens not to fuss ourselves about tomorrow!”

“Tomorrow?” questioned Barter, pulling in his legs and yawning, “why tomorrow?”

“Have you forgotten tomorrow's Good Friday, Tom?'9 said Mary; ”and that reminds me,“ the girl went on, jumping up from the couch, ”that it's fully time I was getting back! Eu-phemia's been expecting rne already for an hour and more. I told her I might be out for dinner; but if I don't get back soon, it'll be her bedtime, poor dear."

The two men exchanged glances. Their look said, as plain as anv masculine look could say anything, “When she”? gone well ha\e some more whiskey, and a real good talk about this affair of leaving the dye-works."

But Mary said, “Which of you is going to take me home?”

They both rose to their feet. All three were standing now in the centre of the room. The twitch in John's cheek became very active as they stood there. Barter said to himself, “I believe there was something funny about that onion soup I had tonight.”

Mary said to herself, “Heavens! I hope Fm not going to develop influenza or anything. I feel a bit shivery.”

What had happened was this: that with their rising to their feet, the sensation of oneness which their staring together into the fire had generated fell to pieces. They were like children who had erected a house of play-bricks into the hollow space of which their minds had retreated. They were like birds in a nest, warm and snug against each other, their individualities overlapping and interpenetrating, feathers and beaks all confused, till suddenly the nest was torn down and they were astray ^and agog and accurst, some on the boughs and some on the ground. Any small group of human beings gathered close together acquires a certain warmth of protectiveness against the Outside, against all those unknown angers of which the outside world is full. A curious psychic entity—like a great, fluffy, feathery hen-breast—is evoked at such times, under which these separate beings crouch, into which they merge, beneath which they are fused. Every human creature is a terror to every other human creature* Human minds are like unknown planets, encountering and colliding. Every one of them contains jagged precipices, splintered rock-peaks, ghastly crevasses, smouldering volcanoes, scorched and scorching deserts, blistering sands, evil dungeons from behind whose barred windows mad and terrible faces peer out. Every pair of human eyes is a custom-house gate into a completely foreign port; a port whose palaces and slums, whose insane asylums and hospitals, whose market-places and sacred shrines, represent the terrifying and the menacing as well as the promising and the pleasure-giving! But when once any small group of persons has been together for any reasonable length of time the official warders of these custom-house gates are withdrawn. Each individual in such a group feels he can wander freely through the purlieus of these other enclosed fortresses! He does not necessarily move a step. The point is that the gates into the unknown streets no longer bristle with bayonets, are no longer thronged with “dreadful faces” and “fiery arms.”

What happened, therefore, when John and Barter and Mary stood up, knowing that they were now going to separate, or at least going to leave the psychic shelter of that room, was that they each fell back upon the isolated worries of their individual lives.

Thus it was that Tom Barter began to recognise that he was suffering from indigestion because of the onion soup of that miserable eating-house. Thus it was that John Crow remembered the annoying fact that he had been constipated of late, and should have, that very evening, to do something drastic about it. Thus it was that Mary, as both the men helped her into her cloak, thought to herself, “I believe I have caught a chill from that open window.” Unable to shake off their selfish preoccupations, they all three went out into Northload Street in a fretful, troubled mood.

“Hullo! Who's that?” murmured Barter as they caught sight of the figure of Sam Dekker advancing along in front of them under the wall of King Edgar's lawn. They soon realised who it was, for Sam, hearing their footsteps, swung round and awaited their approach.

Sam had never goc on very well with Mary; though the subtle causes of the coldness between them would offer psychological material enough to fill a volume. Perhaps the basic cause was that Sam's erotic nature was—like his father's—as simple and primitive as a cave-man's, while Mary had enough of the contorted perversity of the Crow temperament to arm herself with invisible spear and shield at his mere approach. Thus as they encountered in the moonlight on this eve of Good Friday, the Mary who shook hands with him was, for Sam, a hard, reserved, contemptuous, designing woman, a woman whose aim, if he had been driven lo speak out all he felt, was to inherit old Miss Drew's money and carry on meanwhile, without beiha found out, a furtive intrigue, devoid of all noble feelings, with her cousin John! And if the Mary who gave a limp, unsympathetic, gloved hand to Sam was a cold-blooded adventuress, the Sam who save a perfunctory squeeze to Mary's fingers, as he blinked suspiciously with his little bear-eyes at her two companions, was a lazy self-indulgent crank who spent his do-nothing leisure in an attempt to corrupt that silly little fool, Nell Zoyland.

Thus, on the eve of the Crucifixion of the Redeemer of all flesh, did the two noblest hearts in Glastonbury weigh, judge, condemn, and execute each other! They dropped the silent Mary at the drive gate of Abbey House. “Good-night. John!” was all 3he was allowed to say to the man whose body she would have liked to cling to, with frantic unappeasable desire, all night long.

“Listen, you two!” cried John, when the girFs figure was lost behind the big laurel bushes, each leaf of which shone like a goblin's shield in the moonlight, “I've never been up to the top of Wirral Hill on a moonlit night. Tomorrow's a holiday. Barter's office will be closed tomorow and so will mine. Let's climb up there together, eh? It'll be exciting on such a night as this!” His eagerness was so intense, and the appeal in his voice so much stronger than any word he used, that the two men consented without demur. They all walked on, still in the middle of the road, while the noise of their footsteps as they walked was mathematically increased by the substitution of Sam's heavy boots for Mary's light ones. They passed the Tithe Barn, where the mystic symbols of the four Evangelists seemed supernaturally large in the moonlight; they turned down Bere Lane and skirted the eastern side of the Abbey Grounds; they turned southwest, not far from the little Catholic chapel; they took a short, backyard cut to gain time; and in less than twenty minutes from the moment John had suggested it they were halfway up Wirral Hill.

“That dead tree by that post, up there,” panted John, “is the queerest dead tree I've ever seen! Evans swore it was a thorn .... in fact a descendant of the original thorn . . . but Mary maintains it's a sycamore. When I saw it the other day with Evans 1 examined it pretty closely and came to the conclusioc that it wTas some tree completely unknown to me.”

“I've been puzzled myself,” began Sam, “about that dead tree up here. Father said, what Evans said, that it was the Saint's Thorn. But, as you say, it's clearly not a thorn, whatever else it may be. Pm sometimes inclined to think------”' He was interrupted by the raised voices of some other people who were climbing Wirral Hill that eve of the Crucifixion. Two of these were apparently extremely aged men who had only that moment just stopped to address some remark to a grotesque female figure who was seated on one of the municipal iron seats that adorn the slopes of Wirral. Sam, who knew every soul in the town, became instantaneously aware of the identity of each one of this little group of night-wanderers. He realised in a flash that one of the old men must have overtaken the other in this ascent, and that neither of them had any connection with the female they were now so earnestly addressing. Sam, in fact, was sure he knew, what it would have been difficult for either John or Barter to know, that each one of these three wanderers had reached this spot independently of the other two. But they formed, as the new-arrivals slowly approached them, a singular and even a monumental group. Had Mr. Evans been present he would have been reminded of one of those eternal vignettes in his favourite poet's Purgatorio; for the hill was steep at this point; its ascent took the breath of the three men and dulled their apprehension, while the flooding moonlight, giving to all objects both near and far a certain unearthly grandioseness, rendered their visual powers dreamlike and distorted. When they reached the iron seat they also stopped and stood, all three, side by side with the two old men, surveying the solitary female wTho remained calmly seated in front of all the five of them.