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But he had done nothing of the kind. And in place of anything like that from him, she had found herself explaining hurriedly that Will Zoyland would naturally think, if she acted with any kind of discretion in so delicate a matter, that the child was his.

“Would he?” Sam had asked; as if, even then, his mind was not really grasping the significance of what she was saying. It must have been at that point that the “all-is-equal” wave of drowsy indifference that had swept over her before he came, once more had exercised its fatal numbing power; for she had seemed paralysed, as people are in dreams, and unable to break through the mysterious barrier between them.

She had found herself taking an almost apologetic tone about her condition; as if her lover had a right to be angry with her for it! She had found herself explaining that even if Will Zoyland were not absolutely convinced, the existence of a doubt in his mind would not make him act violently or abruptly, if she did not leave his bed till everything was further advanced.

It was then that Sam had said: “You are sure it is ours?”

The brutality of this question had brought tears to her eyes; but she had only looked reproachfully at him and had murmured —“Of course it's ours, you silly!”

But the revolting idea had crossed her mind, as he put that pointblank question------“Suppose I didn't know myself which of them it was?”

The relief that she did know—and as far as that went—knew beyond all question that it was Sam's, held now, for her dazed intelligence, such a comfort, after that diabolically horrid idea, that she threw still further emphasis into her plausible argument that everything would go on quite naturally and as if it were her husband's.

“But suppose it's like me when it's born?” Sam had scrupled not to interject with an almost comic solemnity.

“Oh, it's not born yet, you 'wretch!” she had replied in quite a flighty tone.

And there had been an interchange of tender, half-humorous speculation between them, after that, as to whether Lhis unknown offspring of theirs would be a boy or a girl; and Sam had said he hoped it would be a girl; and she had said—her mind all the time thinking, “How different this is from what I thought it would be!”—that if he really wanted it to be a girl she would make it a girl, by thinking of nothing else all the time!

And then the trouble between them began. Sam started it by talking on and on to her about some startling experience he had recently had . . . something to do with a mad woman and the old-curiosity-shop man on Maundy Thursday, when he was climbing Wirral Hill with John Crow and Tom Barter; but he was so clumsy at expressing himself, and she was so slow in catching the drift of his thought, that they irritated each other, in the way simple-minded people so easily do, by their mutual misunderstanding long before he even reached the real danger-point of what he was trying to tell her.

“It's something that's been coming over me for some time, Nell,” he said, with his hand tightening so fast upon hers, in his anxiety to make himself clear, that he hurt her fingers. “It's not religion in my father's sense; for I don't believe ... in anything ... at all.”

“I like your father, very, very much,” Nell threw in.

“No, no,” he went on, “it's not religion in his sense, because I don't believe in one single one of all those things.”

He knew he was expressing himself lamely and badly, in fact childishly; but all he could do was to go on hurting her soft, formless, school-girl fingers in his muscular grip.

Her owTn mind was so benumbed, that the discourse between them, as the dark, hushed afternoon of Easter Monday wore on, would have seemed to any eavesdropper as incoherent as the talk of a couple of inmates in that State Asylum so much dreaded by Mad Bet.

“It's not that Fm considering Christ simply as an ordinary man,” affirmed Sam in a high-pitched dialectical tone. “I'm considering him as a God. But I'm considering Him as a God .among Other Gods. I'm considering Him as a God who is against the cruelty of the great Creator-God. What has given me such an extraordinary feeling of happiness these last days is the idea that ever since Christ was tortured to death by the Romans to please the Jews there has been a secret company of disciples who have believed in His methods of fighting the cruel Creator-God . . . these methods of His . . . simple and yet very hard to catch the drift of . . . till you get ... a sudden illumination . . . like Saint Paul . . . only mine came to me on Silver Street, at the bottom of the drive, where you can see the elms over the wall . . .”

“Let go my hand, you're hurting me.” Up wei.fc her fingers to her sulky red mouth when he released her. He had certainly left them bloodless.

She began to feel hungry. “I wish,” she thought, “I could just run into the kitchen and put the kettle on without hurting his feelings. How queer men are. He has already completely forgotten that I've made him a father.”

“I don't believe in the Church, Nell,” Sam went on, “like Father does. I don't believe in the Creed at all. But I believe in the Mass; what in our Church we call the Sacrament; I believe as it says in Latin, Verbum caro factum est, the Word was made Flesh.”

“I think I'll put the kettle on,” she murmured, without realising the irony of these last words so apparently unrelated in his mind to the “word-made-flesh” in herself! She had grown so hungry and had come to long so desperately for a cup of tea that when he came to utter the word “Creed” it was on the tip of her tongue to give vent to a quivering, long-drawn-out scream, so that the great Latin syllables fell on deaf ears.

Sam the naturalist had certainly been overlaid by Sam the theologian; but there wTas a sturdy animal instinct in him that now broke through the spiritual chain-armour that he was wearing like a tight-fitting aura or like an etheric body. It broke through this aura with such a leap that the girl was frightened.

“I'll put it on for you!” he cried suddenly getting up with a bound from her side. He rushed into the kitchen, and she heard him empty and fill the kettle; and then she heard him clattering with the iron cover of the stove as he pushed it aside with the short poker she kept for that purpose and settled the kettle in its place.

“He hasn't even looked to see how the fire is,” she thought. With a weary sigh she got up and followed him.

She caught him staring out of the kitchen window as she entered, an ecstatical stare, like the sta^e of a village boy watching the circus clown,

“What is it?” she asked, putting her arm on his shoulder. She wanted him to fondle her and tell her how wonderful she'd been to make him a father. Instead of this he drew away from her touch.

“Oh, you will understand, Nell darling,” he said, “when I've told you everything, why I can't be like I was before?” He turned his broad back upon her and walked out of the kitchen. He made blindly for the couch where they had been sitting when she murmured about the kettle. And she followed him submissively to that familiar couch.

She made a motion as though to sit on his knee, but he warded her off, clutching her wrist with a rough violence and pulling her down by his side.

“That's what I really came to see you about, Nell; to be absolutely frank with you; as we always are with each other, aren't we?”

She thought bitterly to herself that if she had been less frank with him this afternoon, never said a single syllable about her condition, he would not have acted the least differently from the way he was acting now!

A faint shivering, like the shivering that had seized her when she read her brother's pamphlet, came over her now. Was Sam__ her dear Sam—going to join that great staring army of men, men, men, men with hairy wrists and hairy chests, men with hard sharp knees, men with brains like printing presses, between whom she had to run the gauntlet . . . and to take her place . . . and her child had to take its place ... in a regimented State, ordered, not by Nature, but by tyrannical Science?

What was it that Sam was saying now?

“—and so, though of course I shall always love you, and you will always be my true love, and we'll be seeing each other just as much as we do now, I've come to the conclusion that it's wrong for me to make love to you any more. The pleasure I get from that kind of thing is so intense for jae—it may not be so with other people but it is so with r^e—that it kills this new-feeling.”

Not a tear came to her eyes. They did not open, or shut, or twitch, or blink, or quiver. Her hands remained lying quietly on her lap just as they had been when he first let them go. She did not clasp them now, nor did she fumble with the loose folds of the green apron which covered her crocus-yellow gown.

She forced herself to look into the eyes of this speaking man, into the eyes of this man-mask, whose chin as he uttered his unkind words imitated the familiar contractions of her dear Sam's chin.

Her simplicity of nature was such that the blow itself brought her one recompense. She was not tormented by doubt. Her Sam had changed into someone else. Her Sam had changed into a Being who called himself the lover of a God called Christ and who henceforth would think it wrong to love Nell Zoyland. Nell made absolutely nothing of what he said about loving her still, though it would be wrong to “make love” to her. Such was her character, such was her conception of love, that to “make love” meant simply to love, and not to “make love” meant simply not to love.

“I don't . . . quite . . . understand . . . Sam dear.”

He put his arm about her and pressed her to him and they stayed like that for a while in sorrowful silence, while outside their walls nothing stirred except the flowing of the river that was like a channel without a bottom, so darkly it poured its flood, as if the sombreness of the low grey skies and their forlorn depths, had been transferred to it to augment its desolation.

“Sam dearest, did you like me the first time you saw me?”

This innocent question which had passed between them, question and answer, so often already, had become like a familiar nosegay by this time which was handed from one to another, to smell at and pass back again, when it was not the moment for more ardent caresses.

Now, when caresses were to be altogether renounced this invisible nosegay gathered to itself a poignant significance.

There were actually tears in Sam's eyes as he lifted her hand to his lips and swore that he had liked her before he saw her; that he had dreamed of her, from Penny Pitches' description, when he had first heard her name!

She made a little movement at this, cuddling up yet closer to him so that the warmth of her body flowed into his. Her green pinafore was open at the sides and as she leant against him he could see—oh, and feel too!—the rounded tightness of her yellow bodice as a deep-drawn sigh expanded her lovely breasts.

It was only by forcing himself to think of that tortured Shadow * hovering above his father's roof; it was only by forcing himself to visualise the actual prints of the nails in that Shadow's hands; that he had the strength to stiffen himself and not to yield, that he had the strength to hold that clinging sweetness away from him. But so piteously was his whole nature stirred that big tears now rolled slowly down his cheeks; several of them actually reaching his twitching chin. They were tears of miserable pity for himself and for her; and for more than themselves. In the pressure of that dark hour there weighed upon him the whole burden of the round world's tragic grief as it swung on its axis. The loneliness of the cold-gurgling stream outside, with that sorrowful sky reflected in it, the silence of that little house enclosing them amid the larger silence of the wide moors; all these things flowed into Sam's heart till it felt as if it must break. To have been given such quivering sweetness, and to have to push it away with his own hand! He had known that it would be hard; but this was worse than he had imagined. The feeling that their passionate mixing together had created a new life—a life that was the knot of their intertwining—made it seem as if an outrage was being done to them both, a rending, tearing, remorseless outrage, that must make a red wound in Time itself, that slippery-smooth Time, that long black snake, that was gliding away under their feet! She kept making little heart-breaking movements to cling closer to him; and he had to put all his will into the arm that held her back, to keep it stiff, to make it like a sword between them.

“I thought you'd be pleased when you knew I was going to have a child.”

“I am pleased, Nell. Your child will be the only child I shall ever have now. And Pm glad it's yours! Zoyland may be generous ... I mean later on • . . when things are different.”

“I can't believe it . . . Sam . . . when I look at you sitting so close to me . . . that you have stopped loving me . . . just when I'm sure about our child.”

Sam was the extreme opposite of a moral casuist. It would have been better for Nell if his conscience had been more sensitive and his passion less strong. It was the strength of his passion for her that made the issue between her and Christ so deadly clear to him.

In these subtle human relations Sam had the blunt obtuseness of a beast, a beast with far less conscience than a faithful dog. He was indeed a forest bear at fiis moment, a bear that was rejecting a treasure-trove of wild-honey for the sake of a garden-hive that he had found.

Nell was just then too stunned to feel anything but this fatal change in him; but later—when she had time to think—she found herself amazed at the unscrupulousness with which he was prepared to allow her to deceive Zoyland about the child. Whatever it was that had touched him with its terrible spell it had left him as non-moral as a savage. There was nothing human left in him to which a girl could appeal.

In his mind at that moment there seemed to be only two alternatives; possessing Nell, or being possessed by Christ A month-old conception, a year-old love, what were these beside the ecstasy, the blind exultation of sharing the sufferings of a God?

“Sam . . . Sam . . . Love me again! Love me again!”

He made a funny little gurgling sound in his throat and looked away from her; looked towards the window. At that moment there were steps on the brick path outside and a sharp knock at the door.