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Cordelia meamvhile had left Nell's side and had taken her seat by Mr. Wollop whose experiences as a youth in dealing with his disreputable parent had made him careful to avoid the contents of the Silver Bowl.

“The rain is spitting in the fire,” said the ex-Mayor.

“I thought I heard a funny noise just now,” said Cordelia.

“Is your Dad here tonight?” said Mr. Wollop.

Cordelia glanced anxiously at the sick woman by the fire, at whose knees Crummie was now standing, bending over her.

“Not yet,” she answered, “but I hope he'll come in soon. Mrs. Petherton's getting worse.”

“I've a'heard about how he can cure folk by laying of his hands on 'em, your Dad.” Mx. Wollop sighed lightly. “Never cured no one in all me life,” he went on, “so I reckon I weren't the Mayor he be. But I took a interest in the people of this town, rich and poor alike ... no distinction! . . . and they knowed it too.”

“I'm sure they knew it, Mr. Wollop,” said Cordelia kindly, soothing the fallen official, as she might have soothed a deposed king.

Mr. Wollop looked extremely gratified. “They knew it, me dear. They knew it,” he muttered, stretching out his arm for an anchovy-paste sandwich, snapping a neat bite out of it with his white false teeth, and then holding it in his finger and thumb like the picture of the Hatter in Alice.

“Oh, me God take pity on me! Oh, me God take pity on me!”

Tittie Petherton, with Crummie by her side, was twisting and moaning in a manner that was distressing to see and hear.

“Haven't no one got any o' they pellets handy,” whispered Mr. Wollop, “what has mercy and pity in 'un?” He looked closely at the scene by the fire. “Sister's skirt was never bought at me shop,” he remarked gravely.

“Crummie told me she's given her already every one of the morphia tablets Nurse left,” said Cordelia. “Oh, I wisl? Father would come!”

“I wish he would come too,” echoed Mr. Wollop. “ 'Twould be a wondrous sight, with this rain spitting down chimney, to see your Dad stop this poor woman's groans.”

Cordelia had an intelligence that was accustomed to wander more than most minds, among the mysteries of life; but she never included her father among these mysteries. For some reason she took her father for granted on the lowest possible level. It seemed, in some way, quite an ordinary thing when her father stopped Mrs. Petherton's cancer from hurting; though if Mr. Evans had done it it would have seemed wonderful.

Barter and the waitress were all this time growing steadily more affectionate and confidential. He had got her to himself at a little table now at the side of the room opposite the windows under the portrait of the seventeenth-century Recorder who was the nephew of John Locke. To this table he kept bringing fresh supplies of Bridgewater Punch and the flushed cheeks and sparkling eyes of Clarissa Smith were an evidence of his success. He had already ascertained the exact amount of her salary, of the income of her father, a taxi-driver in Dorchester, of the expense she had been betrayed into this Easter "over at WollopY' in the little matter of underclothes and stockings, and even of what she had had to pay for her shoes last Christmas.

He had now reached the stage—his second stage in the process of seduction—of telling her fortune by the lines in her warm palm. It was becoming clear that poor Tossie Stickles, now under ecclesiastical and domestic protection, need not have worried about her gentleman's lack of feminine support. With Tossie rendered hors-de-combat it had become the turn of Clarissa. A new girl was a new world to Mr. Barter and his sluggish East Anglian senses stirred in their fen-peat depths, like great crocodiles heaving up out of sun-baked mud, to meet this new world.

The fact that novelty was so irresistible to him in these matters was a proof of something essentially stupid in his nature. It is one of the psychological mistakes that the world makes, to assume that a man whose inclination drives him on to attempt seduction after seduction is a man of more ardent erotic passion than the more constant lover. The very reverse is the case.

The most absorbing and distracting, the most delicately satisfying, of all lovers for a girl, are neither the thick-witted novelty-hunters, nor the sour puritans. They are the vicious monogamists! Such indeed are the triumphant Accomplices of Life; and when you see the pleasures of unsated and natural lust carried on between two elderly people—as, owing to Bloody Johnny's occult wisdom, they were carried on between Mr. and Mrs. Geard— you see a checkmating of Thanatos by Eros such as makes Mr. f3a*'tcr,s brutal approaches and Miss Clarissa's silly yieldings as commonplace as they are uneventful.

“You should hear what the girls down at our place do say about what you rich gentlemen do in this house,” giggled Clarissa.

"I must say I think you Glastonbury young ladies haven't much to learn,''1 responded Mr. Barter, wliose experience had taught him the exactly correct tone to take.

“They do say that this house be called Camelol,” said the girl, drawing back her hand from across the table but grudging in her heart that the conversation—even though she had led il astray herself—should have wandered from her good heart line and promising fate line.

“I didn't know that,” said Mr. Barter. “There! Finish up your glass and I'll get you some more. No, I didn't know that. I come from London, you know.”

For two reasons did he tell this lie; first because he knew that the word London always had a glamour for provincial young ladies, but secondly because the deepest thing in his nature being his feeling for Norfolk he never referred to it, with any of his light-of-loves, any more than he referred to his passion for airplanes.

If Barter had put the imagination into his love-making that he put into these two integral passions the gross stimulus of novelty would have been less important to him. • “I suppose,” jsaid Clarissa Smith sententiously, dropping her Dorset accent to impress her educated admirer, “that in the Dark Ages you gentlemen did what you liked with us poor girls.”

“I hate the name Camelot,” said Mr. Barter? and for a second, even in the salt-tide of his rising lechery, he longed to pour out his feelings to Mary Crow. How that rain beat on the windows! It must be a wild night outside.

Clarissa didn't like the change in his voice or the change— momentary though it was—in the expression of his face. She toyed with the sham pearls that adorned her plump white neck and her melting brown eyes wandered to the moaning figure by the fire. “They oughtn't to bring sick people to parties,” she thought.

“I suppose in them days,” she remarked, the Dorchester accent slipping back, “Camelot was a place where a quiet girl dursn't show her face.”

"Have you lived here long?*' Persephone Spear was saying just then to Blackie Morgan.

''Born here, Mrs. Spear, and me mother before me. Father came from Wales."

“How soon do a mother's thoughts begin to influence her child?” thought Nell Zoyland as she listened with sweet attention to what Mr. Evans was now saying to Cordelia.

Cordelia thought she had never met such a nice, unassuming lady as Mrs. Zoyland. It flattered her profoundly to watch the tender interest with which, considering how little she knew either of them, she was now listening to Owen's words.

Mr. Evans himself had almost forgiven her for being the first to drink from the Silver Bowl!

“What is going to happen to me? Oh, what is going to happen to me and Sam's child?” Nell thought. “Oh, I wish it wouldn't rain so hard. It gets on my nerves the way it sounds. I must ask Percy soon what we'd better do if it goes on like this. But I mustn't fuss and get silly! From now on, till Sam's child is born, I must be calm and sensible about everything. I wonder why Sam doesn't come and talk to me.”

The noise of the rain seemed now to be steadily increasing in that room of glittering lights and black curtains. Nor was it only Nell Zoyland who felt aware of it as something coming upon them all from outside—from far outside—coming over the wide-drenched moors, over the hissing muddy ditches, over the sobbing reeds, over the salt-marshes; coming from somewhere unearthly, somewhere beyond the natural!

There was a curious instinctive movement in that big room as if all those who were present were seeking to get reassurance from one another and to gather closer together. There was more drinking too. Cups and glasses were dipped again and again in the great Silver Bowl; and the voices rose and rose, as that little group of human consciousnesses—arguing, reproaching, challenging, jesting, sneering, accusing—sought in some subconscious way to outbrave a Presence which they all felt pressing in upon them from that unearthly “outside.” Mr. Evans had moved away now from Cordelia and Nell. A strange restlessness had come upon him. He began walking up and down beneath the pictures of the Recorders.

“To let it all go,” he thought, “to go home now through the rain and go down those stairs and read that book! Yes, yes, yes: yes, to read that passage, that page, which I've avoided since I first found it ... to look at that picture ... to tell myself that story ... to remember . . .”

He stood still, his eyes on the crossed legs of one of the complacent Recorders. And it was allowed to him as he stared at those silver-buckled shoes, so crudely painted, to travel with the speed of lightning along the road that he would have to follow if he did begin all that again. He became the terrible craving, he became the thing he was doing, he became the itch, the bite, the sting, the torment, the horror, he became the loathing that refused to stop doing what it loathed to do. He became the shapeless mouth that------

Human thoughts, those mysterious projections from the creative nuclei of living organisms, have a way of radiating from the brain that gives them birth. Such emanations, composed of ethereal vibrations, take invisible shapes and forms as they float forth. Thus to any supermaterial eye, endowed with psychic perception, the atmosphere of Mrs. Legge's front parlour that night must have been a strange scene. The secret thoughts of her guests rose and floated, hovered and wavered, formed and re-formed, under those glittering candelabra, making as it were a second party, a gathering of thought-shapes, that would remain when all these people had left the room. All thought-eidola are not of the same consistency or of the same endurance. It is the amount of life-energy thrown into them that makes the difference. Some are barely out of the body before they fade away. Others—and this is the cause of many ghostly phenomena—survive long after the organism that projected them is buried in the earth.

All the while Tom Barter was progressing so prosperously with his seduction of the brown-eyed, white-throated Clarissa, the remorseful thought of himself as the traitor to his late employer took the shape of a shadowy creature bent double under a swollen load, from beneath which its lamentable eyes strained upward, tugging at the strings that held them in their sockets.

Meanwhile Persephone Spear was projecting from her graceful body, whose provocative outward form was at this moment interesting but not exciting the senses of Mr, Wollop as he sat placid and content at the mahogany table, a very queer homuncula of desperation.

“I hate all men,” she had kept thinking to herself, "all, all, all! I have found that out now! I thought it was because Dave was just Dave that I drew back from him. I thought that if I let Philip take me some new feeling would be born in me. But it hasnt been born. In Wookey Hole it was exciting. Just the shock of it. Just the pain of it. But I hate the way men are model I knew it when I first saw Dave naked and now—since yesterday at that inn in Taunton; which was worse, far worse, when

Philip------Oh, what shall I do? Where shall I go? Why was I

born in this world at all? I want to love, I want to love, but there's no one!"

The moans of Tittie Petherton as she hugged to her tortured entrails those iron spikes of that round globe of pain which was all that she could think of—though a hideous reproduction of that engine hung in the air above her for eyes that could see it —had now become so dominant in that room that conversation began to lapse.

“Can't anything be done to ease her?” said John to Dave Spear.

“I'll go and fetch Dekker,” replied the practical Communist. “He brought her here. He'd better take her home.”

With these words the fair young man hurried away. “Dekker!” John could hear him calling. “Dekker! Dekker!”

John turned to Cordelia. “Have you ever heard such rain?” he said. “Fm afraid the Mayor won't come at all on such a night. I think one or other of us ought to call a taxi and take that woman straight to the hospital.”

Cordelia looked at him contemptuously. She often felt as if her father had never shown his inherent stupidity more clearly than in his choice of this grotesque individual with a Sl Virus dance in his cheek and the look of a deboshed actor. “I don't believe he ever has a bath either,” she said to herself.

There came over Cordelia at that moment a blind physical wave of hatred for John Crow.

“I don't like the way he smells,” she thought.

Nothing would have amused John himself more than this particular reaction of Cordelia's. To most human persons a physical repulsion on the part of another to so intimate a thing as the smell of their skin would have been an insult never forgiven. But the consciousness of John Crow was so loosely attached to his bodily frame that he would have been capable of meekly retiring from Cordelia's bed—had she been his mistress—and sprinkling himself with Attar of Roses, if it pleased her, without bearing her the least grudge.

“I like my cousin Dave, don't you?” was all he said now. “He's the only really unselfish person I've ever met. And yet, I suppose, if it brought his Communistic State a year nearer, he'd have us all shot tonight without the flicker of an eyelid.”

A terrible moan from the woman by the fire interrupted them and they both caught a tearful, helpless appeal in CrummieV eyes as she turned from her patient.

“The hospital------” began John; but Cordelia cut him short.

“She won't go,” she said. “They tried it once. They'd have to make her unconscious first.”