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On John's left, behind his hostess and Mr. Evans, were two high windows, covered now by heavy black curtains that fell from great wooden curtain-rods painted red.

Similar curtains hung over the doorway; but ihese were now partly drawn.

All round the walls were rough, crudely painted oil pictures of the ancient Recorders of Glastonbury, an office which eventually gave place to that of Mayor. These old worthies now looked down upon this motley assembly with that ineffable complacence which the passing of time combined with crude and faded oil-pigments alone can give.

But their presence gave a touch that was required; as did also the mouldering dark-brown wallpaper, a relic from the days of the Camels; and the black frames out of which these burgesses stared; and the big bare mahogany table in the centre of the room.

As John glanced dreamily into their faces they seemed to look back upon him with a look that said—“When a Glastonbury Recorder dies he passes into a land where men of solid worth are permitted to despise the vulgar, without qualm of conscience or rebuke of priest!”

Thus did old Peter King, whose uncle was John Locke, the philosopher, thus did Fortescue Tuberville, thus did Edward Phellips, Davidge Gould, Henry Bosanquet, Edmund Griffiths and William Dickinson, look down upon John Crow; and it seemed to John as if there were some residual secret of human experience that this particular group of human beings, these living, and those dead, could reveal, if only with one mysteriously wide mouth, like the mouth of some great, wise, pontifical salmon from the River Severn—a veritable Recorder among fishes— they could utter the word! It would, John felt, be a word that allowed for human imperfection, proceeded from human imperfection ; yes, and even exacted human imperfection. It would be a due that exacted meanness, weakness, pettiness, ordinariness, conceit, vanity, complacency, commonplaceness, mediocrity, conventionality, smugness, hypocrisy; before the full significance of human life could emerge.

John wondered to himself for a moment to whom in all this gathering of people he could speak about this inspiration of his —this revelation as to the value of inconsistency, complacency, weakness, silliness, conceit—which he now derived from the contemplation of Mother Legge's guests, both living and dead; and he decided that the only one who would understand him would bo Mad Bet.

“I must go over to her in a minute,” he thought. “She won't be able to stand Cousin Dave's discourses much longer. How her eyes do stare at me! I must go over and tell her what I've just thought before I forget it. Damn! It's going . . . it's gone! What was it? Could it have been that laziness, self-satisfaction, self-deception,—stupidity even—are necessary if life is to be grasped in its essence? That sounds quite silly. How her eyes do stare at me!”

He turned his own eyes appealingly to those old Recorders, each one of whom had been collected for Mrs. Legge with patient labour by Number Two. “Recorders of Glastonbury!” he thought. “Is it my destiny to learn the secret of the mystic value of the commonplace from you? No—it can't have been just that. It was damned near it, though.”

His erratic mind now found itself dallying with the monstrous thought of what it would be like to embrace a woman as old and hideous as Mad Bet! He felt a certain surprise because this thought—so queerly were his nerves adjusted—did not cause him any terrible shrinking. Was that because he was congenitally more attracted to men than women? “Is the way I make love to Mary,” he thought, “a sign that I am all the time half-thinking of her as a boy?”

“Evans!” he suddenly said aloud, addressing his friend and jerking his stool forward a little so as to see that grotesque Roman profile of the Welshman. “Evans! Do you think it would be possible to make love to a woman who was—I beg your pardon Mrs. Legge, I interrupted you, I'm afraid.”

Mrs. Legge stretched out a small plump hand and with a gesture as royal as Queen Victoria herself patted John's shoulder. “Aye, what's that, young man?” she chuckled amiably in her thick throat.

“I was asking Mr. Evans,” reiterated John shamelessly,

“whether he thought it was possible to make love to a person who was perfectly hideous.'”

“You don't mean here?” purred the preposterous lady, tapping her bosom, which resembled Glastonbury Tor, except that in place of the tower, it held aloft a big golden brooch, with the tips of her fingers. “You mustn't encourage my astrologer to make fun of his old woman in her own house.”

Mr. Evans' countenance as he now turned it towards John showed no distaste at being called Mrs. Legge's astrologer. It was animated by a rush of all the learned and recondite folklore that John's question summed up.

“There is a profound esoteric doctrine, Crow,” he said solemnly, “in what you've just remarked. Our old Cymric poetry is full of references to it. Ceridwen herself, the Welsh Demeter. appeared frequently in an unpleasing shape; and in the History of the Grail it is recorded again and again that the Grail-Messenger was of striking ugliness. Ugliness seems indeed to have been one of the most common disguises of that Feminine Principle in Nature which-------”

“But Evans, Evans!” interrupted John, “Wasn't it a Phorkyad that Goethe in Faust makes Mephistopheles-------”

“Chut! Chut! Man-alive!” cried Mother Legge. “Don't *ee in-vocate Mr. Orphanage in me Best Parlour. Such devils, as he be, may be ones for liking we when us be frights; but / baint asking for their hot hugs yet awhile! What do you think of these naughty lads' chatter, Tittie, me poor child?” And she leaned forward out of her big chair raising her voice.

“I can't hear . . . hear . . . you . . . very well, Auntie. Me pains be bad.”

“These gentlemen say that there be men what 'ud cossec we,” shouted Mother Legge, “when us hadn't a tooth left in our head!”

“You were alias one for your bit o' mischie, Aunt,” replied the sick woman with a great effort, fumbling at the rug over her knees with her bony hand, "but 'twould be different if . . .

'twould be different if-------" Her voice died away in a moan of

pain. The pain took various shapes in Tittie Petherton's eon-sciousness according to its intensity. What it resembled now was a round black iron ball of a rusty blood-colour, covered with spikes. Tittie herself was hugging this ball to her bosom. When she pressed it, the hurt from those iron spikes was intolerable, but she couldn't see its bloodiness any more, which was the thing that turned her stomach most.

“He says no one is going to be allowed to have anythink to theyselves. Be that true, my precious marrow ? ”

Mad Bet's shrill voice from her seat by the mahogany table rang through the room. She had stretched out her long arm and was pointing to John. There was a general hush.

“It is true,” pronounced Dave Spear in a firm resolute voice.

“Let my True-Love speak,” cried Mad Bet again. “If He says it's true I'll believe you. But if He says it's a lie, I'll never be lieve you!”

What made John answer this interrogation as to whether, in a hundred years—for so he worded the question to himself—Glas-tonbury would be communistic, exactly as he did, was due purely and solely to his idea that it would please Mad Bet! He suspected that Mad Bet must be naturally so hostile to the existing system of society that it would give her immense satisfaction to think of any drastic change.

He also—such was his ridiculously weak nature—disliked the idea, after this formidable silence, of hurting the feelings of Dave Spear who took this matter of Communism in such dead earnest.

Thus he lifted up his head, unclosed his eyes, met the intense stare of the madwoman, who was waiting for his response as though it were the verdict of Heaven, and cried out in a queer, husky voice as if he really had been seized with the spirit of prophecy—“Mr. Spear is right!”

He had no sooner uttered these words, than above the clamour of loosened tongues from all quarters of the room, there came the unmistakable sound of rain, striking heavily against the windows. - Mother Legge struggled to her feet in a moment.

“Tewsy! Tewsy!” she called out in her most deep-throated tones.

The door-opener of “my other house” came hurrying in from where he was superintending the tea-drinkers.

“Run upstairs and shut the window of the Nursery, Tewsy! I left it wide open.”

Mr. Evans and John and Barter and Dave, along with Nell and Percy, were the only persons present who heard the word ''Nursery" with surprise. Everyone else knew that it was Mrs. Legge's humour to call her own private little sitting-room upstairs by this familiar name.

The big lady herself now walked to the black curtains and pulled them aside. She pulled also aside a pair of gigantic muslin curtains, yellowish from age, which had been there as long as she had, which had, indeed, been her very first purchase after she leased the house from old Miss Kitty Camel; for, said she, ''I can't abide Over-lookers!"

Then she looked forth into the night. Many heads were turned towards her as she stood there, with her broad black back to them all; and there came into the mind of John, who kept his eye on her as he went across to Mad Bet, a queer feeling as if this whole great room, under those glittering suspended lights, were a real nursery and he and all the rest of the company frightened children at a disturbed party, with Something more menacing than ordinary rain beating out there at the window! The old lady came back into the room.

“Well, it's been coming all day,” she said, “and now It's come. It's a good thing it's waited till now, for the holiday.”

John thought to himself, “How often must those words, for the holiday, have been uttered in Glastonbury houses by comfortable people gathered in snug interiors; people whose w^hole life was one long 'holiday'!”

She had come back to her “children” now, that old black-backed Mother Goose, and her soothing words “for the holiday,*' went about the room, like an eiderdown coverlet endowed with soft wings, whispering to everybody—”Your frightened soul can tuck itself in bed again, little one. Mother has sent away that Something, so much more terrifying than the rain, that was coming after you!"

The fantastic notion now entered John's shameless head that this rich old Procuress, who had arranged so long for the unlawful pleasures of Glastonbury, had in very truth been a kind of mystical Mother—like one of the Mothers in Faust—in driving away fear. There were other “queer sons of chaos” than “Mr. Orphanage”; and no escape from cosmic isolation was more complete than that to which Young Tewsy held the candle!

Mother Legge went out now, doubtless to reassure her guests in the other rooms; and to the accompaniment of what was now torrents of lashing rain the general conversation went on.

The men of the party—and even some of the women—began drinking again now. Young Tewsy brought in a colossal Silver Bowl and placed it on the mahogany table. This turned out to be a much stronger concoction of Bridgewater Punch than the previous jugs had contained.

A very curious incident occurred at this point of the evening's happenings. At the deparLure of Mrs. Legge followed by the appearance of this great Silver Bowl a general movement had occurred among the guests. Some of the people in the room left it, others entered it, and many changed their seats, their companions, their mood. Mr. Evans for instance vacated his chair by the old lady's now empty seat and moved hurriedly into the group gathered about the table. As he came forward he passed the pretty waitress towards whom Tom Barter was carefully steering his way holding the first tumbler that anyone had, dared to dip into that Silver Bowl.

Against this tumbler Mr. Evans, pushing frantically forward, clumsily, but as it appeared accidentally, propelled himself^ knocking it out of Barter's fingers. Other hands which, following Barter's example, were now ladling liquor out of the Silver Bowl, paused in their pleasant task when Barter's glass fell, while their owners looked about to see whose drink had been spilt.

Mr. Evans, however, hurried quickly to the Silver Bowl, snatched a mug from the table, scooped up some punch with a sweep of his long arm, and rushing to Cordelia's side pressed it upon her.

“Quick,” he cried, panting and agitated, “drink quick!”

But Cordelia, vexed by her friend's impetuosity, instead of doing what he told her handed the mug to Nell, to whom she was talking; and Nell, still too preoccupied with her private thoughts to be alert to what was going on, lifted it heedlessly to her lips.

Thus, among all that company, Nell Zovland was the first to drink from Mother Legge's Silver Bowl.

When Mr. Evans perceived that his rude if not violent haste had been in vain, he left Cordelia as brusquely as he had approached her, and returning to where Barter's glass had been broken, began patiently to help that gentleman in collecting the scattered fragments and placing them on the table.

“I'll finish it—nowT I've begun,” he cried to Barter, from his stooping position upon the floor, “You go and get Miss------”

he paused from ignorance of the waitress' name—'“another one. I'm sorry I did it.”

Barter gave the Welshman's bent back one of his most vindictive scowls. But he went off to do what the man had bidden him. Blackie, who had been observing this scene from the beginning with her wide grey eyes, now turned to Persephone Spear who alone among these people had been talking to her. "Be that Mrs. Zoyland from out Sedgemoor way?*' she murmured softly.

Percy smiled, lifting her dark eyebrows. “Yes, that's Nell. She's my husband's sister.”

“She was the first to drink,” rejoined the other, still in a timid whisper.

“Well?” said Percy still smiling. “Why not?”

“It's the Camel bowl,” murmured Morgan Nelly's mother. “Mrs. Legge bought it from old Miss Kitty, It's from the Abbofs Kitchen they do tell. 'Twas what they old Popish Monks did drink from, afore King Harry's time.”

“How did Miss Camel get it?” enquired Percy, relieved to see that her husband was deep in conversation writh John Crow, while Mad Bet, from her seat at the table which she seemed afraid of leaving, watched the latter's face with doglike attention-

“Her were descended from they wold Papists,” whispered Blackie. “There be wondrous witchcraft in thik Silver Bowl. I do knowT, for I've done charwork in this here house since I were a young maid.”