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It would have been erroneous to say that Mr. Geard experienced any poignant temptation. The appalling struggle he had just been through had left his vital energies at their lowest possible ebb. It would have been possible for the girl to have slid much closer to him than the was, sitting there like a little marble figure at the foot of his couch, and still he would have suffered no carnal stir-Calmly he allowed himself to drink up her delicate beauty; to drink it up out of the midst of that vast, shadowy chamber; as if he were drinking it from a great basin of cold black basalt.

“Let me come and live with you. Mr. Geard! Please, please let me!” she pleaded in a passionate whisper.

He smiled a little; he sighed a little; he pressed her cold fingers tightly; but he gave his big head as it rested on the pillow an imperceptible shake.

“Don't 'ee say it, girlie,” he murmured. “Don't ”ee say it, my pretty! I dursn't let 'ee. No, no, no; I dursnrt let 'ee. But 'ee shall often come to see I; sure 'ee shall; and see me good Mr. Barter, and tell he all about they pretty, pretty images."

The tears came into her eyes again and her mouth began twitching, just as it had done when she first appeared.

“Tell 'ee what, wenchie,” continued Mr. Geard, deliberately reverting to his old MonUcute Town's End speech, “tell 'ee what Us 'ull ask that fine lad o' your'n, from Middlezoy, to sup wi' the Missus and me; and ye shall come and meet 5un. Ye'll like that, girlie, eh? Ye'll like that, won't ye?”

He felt, rather than saw, the hot young blood rush into her cheeks.

“Well, well,” he murmured. “We mustn't tease a good, kind, little girl, what's come across the cold stones in her bare feet to save an old man from they ghosties. No, no, we mustn't tease her; but, say what you will, Missy, you'll be monstrous pleased with my Miss Crow. And remember this, Rachel, if it hadn't been that there was a person like Miss Crow in our town I could never have pressed your father to let you come to us.”

“I wish she was at the Devil!” cried the angry child with a flash of fierce Varangian fury.

“Come, come,” he retorted, “for all you know she may be at the Devil; and it'll be the Devil's own kettle of fish when Rachel Zoyland comes to Glastonbury!”

But the girl suddenly stiffened all over.

It was now nearly two o'clock, when the resistant power, not only of young descendants of Charlemagne but of birds and fishes and plants and beasts is at its faintest, the hour when the very seaweeds in the deep salt tides shrink inward upon themselves, when the sap is weak in the forest mosses, when the pine needles in the frozen hills carry their burden of snow most feebly, when the fern fronds on a thousand wide-stretched moors are numb and cold and indrawn.

The girl's nerves were thoroughly jangled. She had been suppressing a fit of bitter crying all that night. This final resistance to her will, this denial of her intense wish, coming at the moment when she had been so brave, coming from the person she had rushed to rescue from God knows what, was for her the breaking-point. Ned Athling, for that moment, passed altogether out of her mind's foreground. She only wanted one thing just then; to live under this man's roof in Glastonbury; and the man himself, lying there so drowsily before her, was calmly denying her this. This, then, was what a girl got for getting out of her warm bed, for crossing the windy flagstones of the Bridge of Sighs, for daring to face the ghost of the Enchanter. This is what she got an easy, unctuous, humorous, grown-up denial cf her natural reward! The indignant Zoyland blood froze in her \eins. She slid down from the couch and lay stretched out. face downward, un the floor.

“Oh—oh—oh!” She uttered this “Oh”* as if it were a thin, little jet of saliva, spat out from under the dartins ton^e of a small deadly snake.

Mr. Geard stretched out his head from the side of hia Led. like a monster lizard from a primeval mud-ledge, and squinnied askance at that motionless heap of white and black, lying on the floor. Then he leaned over and pulled the candle away from beside the edge of her night-gown.

“Oh—oh—oh!” Her prostrate body separated that candle-flame now from the crevice between the oaken boards through which he had seen the light in the room below and heard those peculiar sounds.

In the deep shadow between the girl's back and the edge of the couch, where the folds of the coverlet rested on the floor, he saw this thin aperture; and he sawT that there ivas a light in the room below. Mr. Geard did not delay. The last thing he desired, at that crucial moment, was an inrush into King Mark's chamber of Mr. and Mrs. Bellamy! He determined to prevent such a contingency by a decisive move. He got quickly out of bed. The heap of black and white fabrics upon the floor neither stirred nor uttered a moan.

He wrent hurriedly across the floor to the chair where he had flung his clothes. He pulled on his trousers, buttoning them tightly round his waist without bothering about his braces. He put his coat on over his woolen vest. Then he returned to his bed and snatching up the velvet coverlet stooped down and wrapped it about the figure on the floor.

Rachel's thin arms resisted him.

“I hate you!”

Mr. Geard prayed in his deep heart.

“Christ, don't let her scream! Christ, don't let her scream!”

He rolled her up in the great heraldic coverlet. The wings of the headless falcon were round her waist. Thus bundled up he lifted her in his arms like an infant. A fold of the rug hung over her face. Kneeling down on one knee and supporting her upon the other—“So, you have got what you wanted!” something cynically whispered in his ears—he picked up her silver candlestick and then rising to his feet, carried both candle and girl resolutely to the door. Out upon the Bridge of Sighs he carried them, that flaring candle-flame and that pride-broken maid; and he felt upon his forehead the air that comes before the air of dawn and is chilliest of all earthly airs. He felt it under his sleeves and between his coat and his vest. He felt it in the marrow of his .bones.

“Holy Christ, don't let her scream!” he prayed.

And then it suddenly occurred to him that the girl couldn't possibly have heard his scream . . . couldn't possibly have heard a sound carried from his chamber to hers . . . with this stone causeway dividing them. Puzzled by this thought and losing now in this pre-dawn air, so full of a particular sort of dew-heavy fatality, the sharper edges of his anxiety, he made the excuse to himself of re-settling the folds of the rug about her throat and propped her body, all bundled up, all mute and unstruggling, against one of the stone parapets of the bridge.

Far away in the west he could see the large, low-hanging, shapeless moon; no longer sick-looking and yellowish, but steely cold and bright, and sailing scornful and proud in a blue-black gulf that held not a single star. For less than half a second Mr. Geard's warm, thick, Christ-supported nature felt the ice-cold paw upon its throat of the unappeased Cerberus of life-devouring annihilation.

Holding tightly to his living bundle and unconsciously giving it little taps with the rim of the flat candlestick whose flame was being blown sideways so gustily that it was almost extinct, Mr. Geard stared into the cold blue-black emptiness that surrounded that distorted moon. He projected his human consciousness as if it had been a stone slung from a catapult,—such stones no doubt had been flung in the days of Bleheris from this very parapet-till it reached the side of that radiant abortion. From that vantage-ground in space he projected it again till it reached the unthinkable circumference of the astronomical universe. From this dizzy point he surveyed the whole sidereal world . . . the whole inconceivable ensemble of etheric and stellar and telluric Matter. Contemplating this ghastly and mind-bewildering Enormity, Mr. Geard, tapping the dark bundle he held with the now quite extinct candle, thought to himself, “My mind has something in it, some background, some basis of secret truth, that is completely outside the visible world, outside the whole staggering vision of Matter! Without the existence of this something else I could not envisage this immense universe at all. Without this deeper thing there would be no universe!”

His thought at that point suddenly became something that was quite different from thought. He felt as people feel when in the midst of a vivid dream they get the sensation that, if they pleased, they could wake themselves up ! This bundle he held, those beech-tree tops down there, that huge stone buttress descending into the moonlit shadows, this sharp-smelling blown-out candle—why, they were all half-insubstantial, half-unreal! But the Christ by his side was wholly real. The Christ within him and about him belonged to a reality that at any minute could reduce all this to a pinch of dust, of thin dust, to feed the Herons of Eternity I

He was startled out of his trance by nothing less than an audible murmur from the bundle he carried.

“Please take me in, Mr. Geard,” sighed this muffled sound. “I am good now.”

He raised her incontinently from the perilous edge of that high parapet and bore her over the bridge to the door in the archway. This door he found ajar. It was easy for him to swing it open with his foot and carry her forward. Down one step they went, down another step, then they emerged into her own warm firelit room.

So brightly was her fire burning—she must have fed it with fresh fuel before she left the turret—that the sheets of her bed, rolled up as when she had tossed them back, gleamed white as swans' down in the rosy glow. He carried her across the floor and laid her gently upon these disordered sheets. With fingers tender as a woman's he pulled away the coverlet from her face. There were her big, amused eyes; there were her brown curls; there was her tremulous mouth, the lips divided in a reassuring smile!

“Sorry I was cross,” she whispered. “FIT go to your Mme Crow's, and you shall ask Ned and me to supper. Did you see the ghost of Merlin, Mr. Geard?”

“How long have you been a good girl like this, Lady Rachel?” he asked.

“Since the moment you picked me up off the floor,” she answered. “I thought to myself, it's worth getting into a rage to be carried to bed by the Mayor of Glastonbury; and so I stayed still. I liked your carrying me, Mr. Geard. I felt like a doll.”

“You'll keep your promise, Rachel, and help Mr. Barter with those little images?”

She made an effort to get her arms free of the purple coverlet; but he laid his hand on its surface and stopped her.

“Good-night,” he said. “I'll find my way back. It's moonlight now.”

"I believe you will make Glastonbury all you want it to be!'1 she cried with shining eyes.

Her face looked so fragile emerging quaintly from the folds of the rug and resting on the white sheet, that, hardly realising what he was doing, he bent down and kissed her cold cheek.

“Good-night, Lady Rachel,” he repeated.

Back once again in King Mark's vast dusky chamber, Mr. Geard set himself seriously to think of his grand design. The girl's words, “You will make Glastonbury all you want it to be,” had started a train of cogitation that it was hard to bring to a pause. To confess the truths too, he felt a little chilly now in his flimsy bed without that noble covering! But his mind went back to that vast array of ancient folios in the room where Will Zoyland had challenged him.

“What those old Scholastics aimed at,” he thought, “I shall fulfil. All their fine-spun logic is dipped in Christ's Blood; and I shall make of that Blood a living Fountain on Chalice Hill, to which all the nations of the earth shall come for healing!”

He tried to warm himself by rolling the bed-clothes tightly around his body, very much as he had rolled the purple coverlet around . . . Nineue. There it was! The two Beings, the old Magician's paramour, and this sweet young creatuure who so believed in the power of poor Johnny Geard, had at last merged in each other. Well! That was how it should be. There was destiny in it. He had been well-advised to ride over to Mark Moor Court on the day of Christ's Resurrection. The old magic monaer had vanished with his heathen Grail—so Mr. Evans said—in the heart of Chalice Hill Well! He, Bloody Johnny, the new miracle-worker, wTould show the world, before he vanished, that the real Grail still existed in Glastonbury.

Wrapped up, like a great fat chrysalis, in his bed-clothes, with his big white face turned to the dying fire, Mr. Geard now awaited the first approaches of dawn. His long vigil that night seemed to have left his brain preternaturally clear. He began to review in calm retrospect the illumination he had received that night as he clutched his living bundle on the edge of those moonlit gulfs of space,

“I know now,” he thought, "what the Grail is. It is something that has been dropped upon our planet, dropped within the earthly atmosphere that surrounds Glastonbury, dropped from Somewhere Else . . .

“I don't know,” he went on thinking, “of what substance this thing is made; or whether it was flung into our material dimension purposely, or by accident, or by ... It is evidently possessed of radiations that can affect both our souls and . . . Everyone who believes in it increases its power. That, at least, is clear—wherever it came from!”

He stared up at the dark, massive rafters, catching desperately at a thought which tantalised him and evaded him.

“Sometimes in dreams/' he thought, ”some little inanimate thing becomes terrible to us . . . becomes tremendous and terrible . . . producing ghastly shiverings and cold sweats ... I once woke up,“ he thought, ”crying out 'the Twig! the Twig!' and it was a little twig, from off some bush, that I had seen . . . just a little tiny twig! I think it was of a dark brown colour . . . sometimes the colour in these things is very important! ... it was bent ... yes! Fm sure of that ... it was a little, dark-brown twig and bent at one end."

He once more felt that he was on the very brink of catching hold of some tremendously important clue.

“Little inanimate things,” he thought, “can become great symbols, and symbols are—No!” he thought, "bugger me black?

That's not what I mean at all! I mean something much deeper, much more living than symbols. Bugger me black! What do I mean? Certain material objects can become charged with supernatural power. Thafs what I mean. They can get filled with a kind of electricity that's more than electricity, with a kind of magnetism that's more than magnetism! And this is especially the case when . . . when . . . when ..."