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Blackie had at this juncture, however, one great advantage over both these gentlemen, from London. She was Glastonbury-born. Too drunk at first for it to occur to her to make use of this advantage she suddenly began to feel, as she became simultaneously more sober and more disgusted, that nothing would induce her, nothing, to spend “a short time” in that house alone with Mr. Robinson. But how to escape? For it was becoming clear that Young Tewsy, softened by the transference of half a crown from the pocket of Red's holiday trousers to that of his own workhouse trousers, was yielding a little. An inspiration seized her. She turned boldly to Young Tewsy and demanded to be taken at once into the presence of his mistress!

Red's eyes opened wide. Young Tewsy's eyes, on the contrary, screwed themselves up into little points of confused amusement. He hesitated for a moment, looking from one to the other.

“The gentleman must wait, then,” he mumbled. “ 'Ee must wait just where 'ee his, till I brings yer back 'ere.”

Mr. Robinson's imagination instantaneously pictured a warm, brightly lit bedroom, free from the intrusion of British Statesmen, and blessed, so to speak, especially for his delectation, by the high priestess of lascivious delights.

“High'll wait with pleasure,” he cried eagerly, thinking to himself, “She can't charge more than five shillings.'” “You go with 'im, sweet'eart,” he said, “honely don't be long!”

There was evidently an entrance from the one house to the other, for Young Tewsy now proceeded to escort the lady up the unpromising flight of stairs which loomed dismally in front of ihem.

Red Robinson set himself <.o wait.

He waited excitedly for ten minutes, hopefully for ten minutes, patiently for a quarter of an hour. Then he began to experience extreme dismay. He cautiously ascended the dismal stairs to the first landing.

Here he found an uncurtained window, looking out, across the slums of Glastonbury, towards the eastern horizon. It was an extremely gloomy evening; but the background of the view now angrily stared at by Mr. Robinson was filled by the massive and noble up-rising of St. John's Tower. And Red Robinson set himself to curse this tower. He cursed the men who made it, who prayed under it, who rang the bells. He cursed the imaginary God it rose up there, so massive and so square, to greet in those gloomy menacing heavens. He cursed its rich architecture and the richer Abbots who designed it. He cursed its buttresses, its crochets, its arches, its pinnacles, its finicals!

Could the ghost of a mediasval builder, with a wicked eve for wild grotesques, have stripped Mr. Robinson then and there of his cockney clothes he would have found him in a state of furious phallic excitement. His frustrated enjoyment of Blackie ran and seethed and fermented through every vein. The image of his grand enemy, Philip Crow, mocked him from St. John's Tower. The feelings that found their human expression in the monosyllable “ 'ate” frothed and foamed like an acid poured out upon the stonework of St. John's Tower. “St. John the Baptist!”' he thought. " 'Ow I 'ate them! I 'ate them all like 'ell!*5

The peculiar mingling of his hate for Philip and his insatiable lust for Philip's girl stiffened and tightened as he stood at that dingy window till they became a demonic entity. No gargoyle on any gothic tower, certainly not on the tower he was gazing at, equalled in contorted malice, intertwisted with the fury of lust, this psychic demon concealed under the neat holiday clothes of Mr. Robinson. He felt as if the passion that filled him might at any moment rend his clothes, crack open his brittle body, and shoot forth over the roofs of Paradise towards that hateful tower! He swept all Glastonbury, all its past, all its future, into the foursquare erection that was thickening and darkening there before him against the sombre east.

He imagined himself as the leader of a wild mob of men occupied in destroying with hammers and mallets every old building in the “ 'ateful” place.

Then he would blot it out! He would plough up the ground where it had been, and sprinkle it with ashes. He remembered from early lessons in his London board-school that something of this kind used to be done to offensive cities. And this is what he would do! Raze it flat. Plough up its earth. Sprinkle it with ashes. Those old peoples knew a thing or two; they did!

When he had reduced the place to a heap of ploughed-up earth, when he had sprinkled that earth with ashes—with ashes from all the filthy buckets in his mother's alley—then he would enjoy Blackie in the best room of the Pilgrims' Inn. Then he would cry “Yes, Blackie!” and Blackie would cry, “I loves yer better than 'im, yer 'andsome hangry man!”

Mr. Robinson must have remained for at least twenty minutes at this window, on the first landing of Mother Legge's “next door.”

His imaginative orgy was interrupted by the voice of Young Tewsy from the hall below.

“Mister! Be 'ee here, Mister? Where be 'ee, Mister?”

In his surprise at finding no man where he had left a very impatient man, in that house of “rooms” for the delights of men, Young Tewsy forgot his manners—that is to say he forgot his North London accent—and relapsed into his acquired Somersetshire, the language of his long residence in Glastonbury.

“Dang yer! Where be 'ee hiding then? This baint a railway station!”

Red Robinson came hastily downstairs.

“Thee's 'oomau be biding along wi5 Missus for thik party, Mister,” said Young Tewsy. Thus speaking he moved to the door leading into the street and held it ajar, glancing furtively out to make sure there was no one at the next entrance.

It became evident to Mr. Robinson that he was being politely but firmly ushered forth into a “roomless” world.

“ 'Asn't she arst for me? Hain't high hinvited, yer blimey hold idiot!”

“I was to tell 'ee, Sir,” said Young Tewsy with dignity and reserve, but with a glittering eye, “that they ladies will send for 'ee when they do want 'ee!”

Thus speaking he continued to hold the door open, opening it just wide enough for the passage of a single gentleman whose shoulders were not very broad.

“Give me back that 'alf crown then, you old blighter, and don't you dare to snigger at people who mean no 'arm ... or one of these 'ere days somebody'll knock your grinning phiz into bloody beeswax!”

Mr. Robinson's anger was like water beginning to drip from a paper bag. It began with trickling drops—“give me back that half a crown”—it went on with a squirted thin jet of wrath— "snigger at people who mean no 'arm*5—and then the paper bag burst outright.

Young Tewsy threw the door open wide. This was the only reprisal that he indulged in, though it was more of a retort than Mr. Robinson realised; for in all his experience as a O. prian doorkeeper, Young Tewsy had only once before done this: and that was when he ushered out Mr. Wollop's father, that disreputable old haberdasher.

“Out with you, Sir,” said Young Tewsy laconically. v“Out with you!”

There was nothing else indeed that Mr. Robinson could do but go out. But as he went out he gave the ex-inmate of Wells Workhouse one glance of so much fury that the old man jerked himself backward as if he had received a villainous blow.

Red Robinson walked down the street without looking back. “High'll make you pay for this! High'll make you pay for this, my fine bitch!”

But the unfortunate man had now to decide where he would get his tea and how he would spend his evening. He decided to go and see if Sally Jones was at home. Mrs. Jones, he knew, admired him; and there was a pallid pleasure in certain innocent liberties that Sally sometimes permitted. He had received the sort of affront that makes a person's own society for the next few hours extremely distasteful and so he hurriedly directed his steps towards the Jones menage, much as a badly bitten tom-cat returns sulkily to the familiar wainscot of his habitual mouse-hunting.

But he found no one at home except Jackie Jones, who had already had his tea and was gravely studying his geography book at the kitchen table.

“What be a estuary, Red?” enquired Jackie after Robinson had waited there for an hour, hoping against hope for the return of the widow and her daughter.

“Hestuary?” the man repeated. “Hestuary did you say?” He went to the door, opened it and looked out. “Hestuary,” he an* nounced to the empty alley, “I hain't got no one!”

Mrs. Legge's hospitality was both large and varied. Tiuie Petherton who was in considerable pain, but not so acute as to make it necessary that she should leave the assembly, sat in an arm-chair by the fire with one of Mrs. Legge's best rugs over her knees. Here she struggled to suppress her groans and enjoy this memorable occasion.

Mad Bet was behaving with wonderful self-restraint, due entirely to the presence of John Crow, who not only talked to her a good deal; but talked to her more than to anyone else in the room.

After the departure of Mr. Robinson from “me little place next door,” which was Mrs. Legge's polite name for her Temple of Venus, Young Tewsy locked and bolted this dubious annex and returned to the main dwelling to help wait on his mistresses' guests. All the rooms on the ground floor of this house—the biggest as well as the oldest in Paradise—were crowded with people; and it would have been a significant discrimination among the old residents of Glastonbury to note just who were the persons who came.

Mother Legge was, as has been remarked, liberal in drinks but stingy in food. Even the drinks, however, were limited to whiskey and gin and to a concoction of the lady's own which she called Bridgewater Punch; among the ingredients of which the particular kind of fiery rum used by sailors was most in evidence.

Sam Dekker, actuated by what in his single-hearted simplicity, he regarded as the proper attitude for a neophyte in sanctity, did his utmost to interest Nell Zoyland and Crummie“ Geard in each other's p*ersonalities. This would have been more difficult—for Nell's mind was still stunned by the change in him and still preoccupied by the certainty that she was, whatever anyone said about it, really with child—if Crummie hadn't been such an exceptionally good-hearted girl. Crummie caught the secret of her rival's sadness with a psychic penetration almost worthy of her father and ”laid herself out" to be sweet to her. And when Crummie did this there were few women—as there were certainly no men—who could resist her coaxing ways.

Thus Sam's simple mind was eminently gratified, as if he had achieved this consummation by something akin to a miracle, when he saw the two girls seated at last side by side rcii/jjhincr Osl? ym:= biscuits and sipping with wry faces the ianious 12riJirev."a£jr Punch, as if they were old friends.

Mother Legge herself, too portly to do much service wiih li-r great silver trays, soon settled herself coniuj/tal iv in cz ji;:> chair, opposite poor Tittle, from which position 01 sovereh-uLv she received such obeisance as her dignity, and. it must Le confessed, too, her Rabelaisian tongue spontaneously exacted.

She was a vast, dusky, double-chinned mountain of a vo?njn. with astute, little grey eyes; eyes that seemed rather to aim al not seeing what she wanted to avoid, than at seeing what she wanted to see. Attracted by both John Crow and Mr. Evans, it was Mother Legge's desire to have both these men at her side. Being the hostess, however, and both these men being occupied i\ith a lady, Mr. Evans with Cordelia and John with Mad Bet, it wa:-some time before Mother Legge obtained her wish. But she got it at last and she got it finally so completely that John was caught on a big footstool between her right elbow and the fire, while Mr. Evans was pilloried on a high-backed chair on her left hand with his profile to the fire.

A fire—and you may be sure that this old sorceress knew this well—is a sure magnet for the magnetism of excitable men, and a sure sedative for the nerves of cantankerous men; and now, with the fire as a second or super-female to give her aid, Mother Legge had her own way with her favourite guests.

All the lights, in the reception room of this huge Priestess of Immorality, hung from the ceiling in the shape of two colossal, cut-glass candelabra, burning gas writhin enormous figured globes from beneath which hung the heaviest festoons of prismatic pendants that John had ever seen. Squinnying cautiously round the room at those moments when his portentous capturer—who resembled a gigantic Gargamelle seeking information from Ponoc* rates—was engaged with Mr. Evans, John took occasion to observe that there was nothing in this high-ceilinged chamber which jarred upon his nature except the physical contortions of the poor woman opposite him as her pain, intensified by her inability to move from where she had been, placed, grew upon her. These twitchings under that rug, these spasms across that emaciated face, he did find it hard to bear, though no one else except Crum-mie, who now and then got up and went across to her, seemed conscious of her sufferings.

Sam had left the apartment now, feeling it incumbent upon him to be where he least liked to be, namely among the petit-bourgeois of the gathering, who were consuming tea and bread and jam at the tables with tablecloths, in the other two rooms. The sight of Sam's self-conscious unselfishness would have fretted John's heathen mind as much as the tablecloths would have done and the homely tea-drinkers. Here in this great chamber, so brilliantly lit by the flashing candelabra every person and every object seemed to fall into a delicious harmony.

He had drunk enough Bridgewater Punch already to be feeling exceptionally serene and as he watched Nell Zoyland and Crummie, Percy and Blackie, Mr. Wollop and Cordelia, Dave Spear—who to Percy's astonishment had just drifted in—talking to Mad Bet, and Tom Barter who was now lost in a deep colloquy with a pretty waitress from the Pilgrims', the whole scene swam and shimmered before him in an incredible luxury of significance. People and objects as John now looked at them seemed transferred from the confused dynamic scramble of life into something just beneath life; something that was there all the time, but that needed a few glasses of Bridgewater Punch to enable it to steal silently forth and show itself as the eternal essence.

This old house of Mrs. Legge's had belonged in former times, before Paradise was overbuilt, to a famous West-Country family called Camel. Certain portions of it were older still and associated with that Richard Atwelle who is buried in St. John's Church and of whom it is said: “This Atwelle did much cost in this chirch and gave fair Housing that he had builded in the Towne onto it.” What the grave shades of these old Camels and still older Atwelles would have felt if they could have seen the present company, who can tell? It did not even occur to John Crow, as he hugged his knees on that footstool by the fire or sipped his punch from a glass placed in the polished fender at his side, to wonder what the future denizens of this spacious room, Comrades perhaps of the Glastonbury Commune, would feel if they could look back upon the existing scene!