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“Do you mean the big room, Lord P.,” enquired Mr. Geard, “that they say extends along the whole top floor of Mark's Court?” He paused for a minute—“I've often heard of this bio-room,” he went on, “but Fve never met anyone who's seen it.”

Will Zoyland got up upon his feet, with a movement that shook the tea-table, and made the cups and saucers rattle.

“I tell you what, you Mayor of Glastonbury,” he muttered in a queer husky voice, “if you'd sleep a whole night in that room up there, I'd—I'd—well! I'd say there was something, some bloody spunk at any rate, in this precious Pageant of yours!”

“William!” protested the Marquis, “you're going a bit too far, my boy.”

Rachel's face had gone white and her eyes had grown large and very dark.

“You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Will!” she murmured in a tone that was scarcely audible.

But Mr. Geard's aplomb and self-possession had completely come back to him. He looked quietly at his host.

“I don't want to intrude,” he said slowly, “or to outstay my welcome; but if there were . . . any way ... of getting ... a message to my family . . . I'd be . . . honoured ... I say honoured ... to sleep tonight ... in the room you're . . . talking about.”

“Don't let him, Father! Oh, you mustn't let him!” cried Lady Rachel with passionate intensity.

Bloody Johnny stretched out one of his plump hands and touched the young girl's knee.

“Listen, child,” he said solemnly. ' Rachel, still very white, looked him in the face.

“I swear to you, Lady Rachel,” said the Mayor of Glastonbury slowly, “that I shall be all right up there.”

He was the first, of the two of them, to remove his eyes. As soon as he had done sr die 2:1:1 d:v-.t « long breath and smiled, and a rush of bh'od. li-t.cii^. I^r u^eks and c*en her soft, ihin neck with a bnely r^ :h i. -\Siu?~n h'.-r pale >k:n. Mr. Gt-ardV own gaze encountered ry.v. th.- Is .-Id. resiles?, unsympathetic stare of Will Zoyland.

The Marquis of P.. v,.V*. after his fashion, was no mean dis-cerner of spirits, thought to himself, “Hurrah lor old Johiun! I'm damned if he hasu't picked himself up. There's nothing of the bounder about him ::«”w. He's standing up to Will now/"

“*I don** . . « mean ... to say.” pronounced Mr. Geard emphatically, “that tlvre are not terrors which are beyond my powers to overcome or to exorcise. Til confess at once, Mr. Zoyland, that if there are hugs and fleas and spiders and dust up there. I here and m»w retract my pledge. But if your people, my Lord.” and he turned to the Marquis, “”have cleaned up that room fairly lately, and if you can get your Sergeant to carry up some kind of a bed there. I'd love to spend the night under your roof . . . only someone must tell my family."

The Marquis gave an imperceptible shrug of his shoulders, as much as to say, *Tm beginning to ^vish I were alone here with m\ daughter; as I intended to be I“” but he rose stiffly to his feet, went to the mantelpiece and rang the bell.

Sergeant Blimp must have been driven out of the warmth of the kitchen by the spiteful hatred of the old couple; for he answered his master's ring almost as quickly as if he had been standing on the threshold like an old-fashioned man-at-arms. The way he now presented himself within the restricted radiance of the candlelight, and stood erect and silent there, suggested to Bloody Johnny's mind the idea that he carried a hauberk or at least an arquebus.

“Blimp,” said the Marquis laconically. "I want you to go up to King Mark's chamber and see if the Bellamys have been dusting it and scrubbing it lately.5*

'•Yes, my Lord. Certainly, my Lord." murmured the Sergeant.

"Run off then! . , . King Mark's chamber/' repeated the Marquis peevishly.

But Sergeant Blimp showed no sign of stirring.

“Off with you, man! Are ye deaf?” cried my Lord crossly.

**It\* . . . it's . . . it's/" stammered the powei'fuj-Iuokir.z henchman.

“It's ivkat?” enquired his master grimly. "?jx-ak ud. \uu fool! Don't stand staring like that, you idiot*r'

“It's ... a long story, your Lordship!” stammered the irou-bled servant.

“A long slory!” cried Lord P., bursting into an unpleasant, sneering laugh. ''What on earth are you muttering about'; Do what I tell you/'

“Your Lordship's orders were,” burst out the man. with a rush of hasty words, withat I should have the whole place thoroughly cleaned, this time; afore you and my Lady Rachel came down. Mr. and ilrs. Bellamy wouldn't have a hand in it. Thev said they'd clean Lady Rachel's room, they said, but nothing more. So I had the remover's van men come in and do it . . . the same as brought down your Lordship's last load from London . . . and . . . and ... to be frank with your Lordship, I haven't been up there since! The men said as how they had cleaned up wonderful clean; and 'twere a good tidy job, they said; and so, seeing as Mr. and Mrs. Bellamy were not-------'"'

The Marquis of P. jumped incontinently to his feet. Mr. Geard at first fancied he was going to strike the luckless Sergeant. When this did not occur he expected him to burst into a torrent of abuse and order him up to King Mark's chamber on pain of instant dismissal. But neither did this happen.

To Mr. Geard's complete astonishment, though not, it seemed, to the astonishment of his son and daughter, the Marquis took not the slightest notice of poor Blimp but walked hurriedly to the door, opened it, went out, and closed it behind him-

The man turned shamefacedly to Lady Rachel.

“I dursn't go up there, your Ladyship. I dursn't do it! I've served his Lordship for ten years, come good, come ill; and I've always done his bidding, and more than his bidding. But go into that room I dursn^t . . . not to save my neck from the rope.”

“It's all right, Blimp,” said Lady Rachel kindly. “Father won't really mind. Don't you worry! He knows what hens got in anyone as devoted as you are. It'll be perfectly all right. You'd better take away the tray now that you are here.”

“Well,'* began Will Zoyland, as soon as the man had departed with the tea-things. ”I expect Yd better be seeing that Father doesn't come to any harm up there.''

He rose from his seat like a great sulky tom-cat, yawning ostentatiously, stretching himself and running his fingers through his yellow beard; and then he strolled heavily and leisurely to the door.

“This all comes of your confounded Pageant, Mr. Mayor,” he rapped out harshly as he left the room.

Left to themselves the young girl got up too, and came over to Mr. Geard's side. There was no room for her to sit on the arm of his chair; but she leaned against it, bending over him and pressing near to him. This tendency of Lady Rachel's to nestle up very close to anyone she trusted, to touch them with her warm body, to yield herself to them, was it a sign that the child in her was not yet absorbed or subsumed in the young woman? Or was it simply an indication that no cruel life-experience had as yet warned her against following a natural, almost universal girlish impulse? Possibly the true explanation of her instinctive desire to let Mr. Geard touch her would have been found to have had more to do with him than with her! It is indeed undeniable that had the Mayor of Glastonbury been free to do exactly what he liked he would have now pulled her down upon his knees; but he was not at all a man to follow any erotic feeling the moment it appeared, and in place of doing this he contented himself with taking her hand.

The girl's feelings were far too vague and floating and ephemeral for her to understand why it was that this taking of her hand at this moment gave her something of a cold chill and partook of the nature of a rebuff.

But although Mr. Geard kept an iron lid firmly screwed down upon his erotic feelings, some inner disturbance, evoking a tan-talisingly vivid sensation of what he might have felt had he not screwed down this iron lid, must have communicated itself to the girl whose hand he held.

“Did you take my side as you promised to?” she murmured tenderly.

He pressed her fingers*

“Not much need, little lady,” he said. “Your father has no intention of handing you over to that woman in Bath. I suggested that you should stop with Miss Crow in Glastonbury . . . Miss Elizabeth Crow . . . and I think I'll be able to arrange that for you. It's a little house in Benedict Street. You and she will be great friends.”

Lady Rachel disengaged her hand.

“I thought you would have me ... in your house . . . Mr. Geard!” she cried indignantly. "Didn't Father ask you about that?0

But Bloody Johnny was spared the embarrassment of explaining to her how little he desired to stir up the muddy waters of snobbishness in his sober dwelling, by the entrance of the Marquis and Will Zoyland.

“Well, Geard,” said my Lord, “it's all arranged. Will has helped me with the bed; and he's told Mrs. Bellamy to do the rest. Poor Blimp is as terrified of ghosts as you seem to be of bugs and spiders! But I assure you the place is as clean as our hall. It's cold though. It's cold as the North Pole. I've told her to light a good fire for you. But it's clean. Those furniture chaps of Blimp's must have had step-ladders up there. It's like a church.”

“I've got my Ford here,” added Will Zoyland, “and I can easily go back to Wookey round by Glastonbury. No, I can't, Father! I tell you I can't!”—The Marquis had begun to press him to stay the night—“Easter Monday's a great day for trippers; one of the greatest; and I've really got to be on the job.”

Some four or five hours later, after a pleasant supper over the open fire in the great hall. Lord P. and his daughter escorted the Mayor of Glastonbury up to the chamber of phantoms. They mounted an ancient staircase beyond the landing where the Marquis' bedroom was, and where the old couple, as well as the Sergeant, had their sleeping quarters. Here there was another small landing, from which a door opened upon the steps leading to a high turret-chamber of which Lady Rachel had taken possession.

“Let's show the Mayor my room, Father,” cried Rachel eagerly:

The Marquis led the way. He carried in his hand a flat silver candlestick, from which the yellow candle-flames suddenly grown large and smoky, streamed backward, as the wind, whistling through the arrow-slits of the tower, blew about :hem as they went slowly up.

A fire was burning in Rachel's chamber and Bloody Johnny, when he caught the glowing essence of this enchanting room, felt a sudden clutch in the pit of his stomach while an outrageous and wild thought seized upon his mind.

Mr. Geard noticed on one side of this vaulted chamber, a subsidiary archway containing a small heavily bolted door.

Lady Rachel intercepted his glance.

"Let's take him over the Bridge of Sighs!*' she whispered excitedly to her father.

The "Marquis swung round on his heel and glowered for a moment with a cold glint of something worse than animosity at Mr. Geard. Lord P. possessed a peculiarity, inherited from his ancestors, of being subject at times to a savage anti-social spasm, a spasm of dangerous repugnance, dividing him and his. as if by a wedge of boreal ice from the particular specimens of humanity he encountered. This characteristic was one which almost all the intimates of Lord P.—unless they had blood in their veins recognised by himself as equal with his own—sooner or later came into collision with.

It is a sentimental mistake to assume that the real aristocracy is free from snobbishness. It is free from that perturbation of spirit in the presence of social ritual which is an accompaniment of snobbishness in ordinary people; but if any psychologist plays with the illusion that such great gentlemen are simple, natural, and naive, in their absence of pride, he is making a profound mistake.

The historic House of Zoyland, descended from Charlemagne on the one hand, and from Rollo the Varangian on the other, had certain peculiarities that separated them altogether from the humbler gentlefolk of England. They had qualities that were unique to themselves and will die with them. One of these was this ice-cold, blindly pitiless frenzy of scorn for normal flesh-and-blood when they grew aware of it in a certain condition of their nerves.

This was the first and last occasion, however, in the life of the Marquis of P. when this projectile of frozen scorn for his interlocutor produced absolutely no effect on the person at whom it was directed.

Mr. Geard was in touch with a Presence that had defeated the Principalities and Powers of this proud planet centuries before the Norsemen came to Byzantium or Roland's horn was heard at Fontarabia!

Thus it wTas with a slightly weary indulgence, too patient and unperturbed to be even ironical, that Bloody Johnny returned.* stare for stare, the withering osilliade of his noble host.

Lady Rachel, however, quite oblivious of this psychic episode, had begun to unbolt with girlish impetuosity the great iron bars that secured this archway-door. She pulled it open, inwards into the room, when she had drawn its final bolt; and Mr. Geard, whose eyes, leaving those of the devil-ridden nobleman, had wandered over this warm, virginal, mediaeval room, and now met hers as she held fast to the thing's iron-wrought handle and kept the door ajar, smiled at her in unembarrassed response. From the girl's face his eyes now wandered again round the various objects in this remote little turret-chamber. There was a queer silence among the three of them while he did this; the reddened smoke from the fireplace, and the long yellow flame from the candle which the Marquis held, moving fitfully to and fro, as the wind rushing in from the stone archway she had uncovered, went eddying querulously round the walls.

Bloody Johnny noticed that the girl's bed—situated in an archway opposite to the one where she was now standing—was covered with a dark green coverlet, upon the centre of which the Zoyland arms, a falcon clutching a bare sword, was worked in dusky crimson. A small shelf of books—they all seemed to be unbound French books whose paper backs looked singularly out of keeping with the rest of that interior—hung at the bed's head, while over the wall space of the corresponding archway opposite the hearth was suspended a strip of faded tapestry, the figures upon which it was impossible to decipher in that flickering light, as the wind, stealing behind it, made it swell and bulge like a heavy sail and then again subside into the level darkness of its obscurity.