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“Read it? I should say her didn't read it,” cried Tossie. “Not with Missus watching she and smiling kind-a patronizing all the while. No, Sally Jones, no, you Simple-Sal! Her took she's letter up to bedroom, same as you nor me might have done and she slammed her door and locked it too—bless her pretty heart! She be a one, she be a one, Sal, and no mistake about it.”

“Have you------” whispered Sally gravely, leaning forward, till the broad brim of her straw hat overshadowed the table.

Tossie put down her cup and nodded emphatically, her eyes gleaming. “Told she yesterday,” she replied. “She were helping I in kitchen and she talked so natural-like that I just up and told her. I didn't mention no names, you understand, but I told her he weren't no marrying man nor never would be. I told her he were a gentleman; and you should have seen the face she made at that!”

“There have been a kind of a trouble, Toss, down our way,” threw in Sally. “I allus knew'd 'twould never last between Red and Miss Crummie. I telled 'ee so, didn't I, time and again? Red be a working-man, though 'tis true he baint a common man. But Miss Crummie be quite different. She isn't a lady. We know thatl But she's different from Red.”

“They weren't engaged, were they?” said Tossie.

“Oh, no, it hadn't come to that yet,” admitted Sal. “For me own part I think Miss Crummie was so haughty and offish with the pore man that he just up and quit.”

Tossie opened her eyes wide. She felt it a little hard to visualise this haughty, obstreperous Crummie!'

Both girls lifted their cups to their lips and took a deep drink. They each searched their minds for something startling to say

Their encounter seemed an important occasion in their li\e*: and they were very unwilling to let it slide by unenjoved 10 the full.

"Mr. Philip and Mrs. Philip be coming to tea this afternoon/ announced Tossie.

“'Mercy on us!”' cried Sally, “and what if this letter to her Ladyship be to say that Mr. Athling be coming to see she?”

Tossie had now the opportunity she had been waiting for. She had not seemed to impress her friend sufficiently with the fact of her intimacy with Lady Rachel. It was not very surprising that she should have confessed her troubles to Rachel. But surely it must startle Sal if she revealed that Lady Rachel had mentioned Mr. Athling to her.

She finished her cocoa gravely, rose from her chair, prodded the potatoes with a fork, stirred the stew, and then leaning across the table smelt at the bluebells. Straightening herself up she next glanced at the door. Then she looked out of the window. Still upon her feet she stared significantly at Sally. Her expression said: “These are no light matters.”

A thrush was singing in a laburnum bush at the end of the little garden. A faint scent of trodden grass from where the two cows were feeding floated in upon the warm air along with that rich song. Both the girls felt a penetrating thrill of happiness. It was May Day; and the spirit of Romance was abroad upon the air.

“He do write poetry,” said Tossie in a low, awed voice. “There be too much talk in this wold town about she and him. People be awTful careless the way they talk.”

“Master said to Missus this morning,” remarked Sally, “that he be a true-blood Saxon.”

“Meaning he over to Middlezoy?” asked Tossie, sliding down upon her chair. How teasing it was when a person didn't give a person the credit for things! Why didn't Sally, instead of telling her what Mr. Geard had said to Mrs. Geard, cry out, “Oh, Tossie Stickles, how wonderful it is that Lady Rachel talks to 'ee so nice and natural!”

“Master said to Missus,” continued Sally, “that Athling l*e the oldest name round here. He said Zoyland were nothing to it”

“His folks be plain farmer folks,” protested Tossie. Then taking advantage of Sally's cup being at her lips, “He do write poetry about she.”

“Did she tell you that?” cried Sally, really astonished at last. Tossie was abashed. The truth was that it was she herself, and not Lady Rachel, who had referred to Mr. Athling. “A little bird told I,” she murmured evasively.

“Be Mr. Philip really coming to tea?” said Sally, beginning to feel—as she listened to that thrush—that there were too many little birds in Benedict Street. One wanted more solid facts. “It's not often, so people do say, that they Elms folk go out together.”

“There was extra orders gived for they little rock cakes, to Baker, this morning,” said Tossie firmly.

It was Sally's turn now to bend forward and inhale the heavy bluebell fragrance. She tilted back the big straw brim of her hat with her fingers as she did so.

“Be 'ee going to hospital when your time comes?” she murmured between her sniffs at the flowers.

“Maybe,” said Tossie.

“Do they let 'ee see Mr. Barter these days?” her friend went on.

Tossie's cheeks got red. “What do I want with seeing a bloke that can keep company with they baggages at Pilgrims'.”

“Lily Rogers told old Mrs. Robinson,” remarked Sally, “that TUssa Smith were angling for Mr. Barter to marry she.”

Tossie's reply to this was more expressive than polite. She put out her tongue at her friend.

“Master were all worked up this morning,” said Sally, content to change the conversation now that she had made mention of Clarissa. “Mr. Philip wrote to he a turble stiff letter about his Midsummer Circus. He said he'd get the Police to stop it.”

“Baint our Mayor above all they Police and suchlike?” pondered Tossie Stickles in a wistful tone. A little bell above the dresser began to tinkle.

“Missus wants summat,” said the girl getting up from her chair.

Lady Rachel did not breathe a word to Miss Crow about the contents of the letter she had received till the two ladies were weeding side by side in the little back-garden.

“I've heard from Ned,” she said quietly then, looking across the sweet-pea sticks at her hostess.

“Yes, Rachel,” replied Miss Crow.

“He's coming to tea this afternoon,” said the youns girl, imil you'll let him."

“Why, my dear, that's as nice as it can be! You know Fve only seen him that once, when the Mayor asked us to meet him.”

“He doesn't expect to find anybody else here,” said Rachel.

“Only my nephew and Tilly,” said Miss Crow, planting her fork in the ground and resting her hand, in her rough gardening gloves, upon its handle. The thrush had flown off into the next little garden, but from there its voice was still audible. The warm air smelt of the disturbed earth-mould, but it smelt too of a more subtle odour than that—it smelt of an odour that came voyaging across the water-meadows from spinneys and copses and withy beds and high uplands and deep lanes and sequestered gulleys and hidden combes and narrow hazel-paths and mossy openings in old woods—the odour of Somersetshire itself! It is only certain days, days under unique conditions of the wind and the weather, that call out from the soil of a particular district that district's own native, peculiar smell. And this May Day was precisely such an especial day. Had any traveller come back to Glastonbury on this day he would have been aware in a second that it was one of those days when the spirit of that portion of the earth distils itself in a rare unique essence. And of what is this voyaging mystery composed? Chiefly of the smell of primroses! Different from all other essences in the world the smell of primroses has a sweetness that is faint and tremulous, and yet possesses a sort of tragic intensity. There exists in this flower, its soft petals, its cool, crinkled leaves, its pinkish stalk that breaks at a touch, something which seems able to pour its whole self into the scent it flings on the air. Other flowers have petals that are fragrant. The primrose has something more than that. The primrose throws its very life into this essence of itself which travels upon the air. But the odour which floated now over that little garden of Benedict Street and hovered about Miss Crow as she looked at the proud timidity in those grey eyes that faced ru_r so steadily, at that light-poised figure gripping so tightly the long hoe she had been using, had yet another pervading slement in it ¦—the scent of moss. Not a patch of earth in any of those spinneys, and copses, and withy beds, that edged those water-meadows, not a plank, not a post, in the sluices and weirs and gates of those wide moors, but had its own growth, somewhere about it, of moss “softer than sleep.” More delicately, more intricately fashioned than any grasses of the field, more subtle in texture than any seaweed of the sea, more thickly woven, and with a sort of intimate passionate patience, by the creative spirit within it, than any forest leaves or any lichen upon any tree trunk, this sacred moss of Somersetshire would remain as a perfectly satisfying symbol of life if all other vegetation were destroyed out of that country. There is a religious reticence in the nature of moss. It vaunts itself not; it proclaims not its beauty; its infinite variety of minute shapes is not apprehended until you survey it with concentrated care. With its peculiar velvety green, a greenness that seems to spring up like a dark froth from the living skin pores of the earth-mother, this primeval growth covers with its shadowy texture every rock and stone and fragment of masonry, every tree root and hovel roof and ancient boarding, over which the rain can sweep or the dew can fall. The magical softness of its presence gathers about the margins of every human dream that draws its background from life in the West Country. The memories of youth are full of it; the memories of old people who have gone to and fro in West-Country villages wear it like a dim, dark garment against the cold of the grave; and when the thoughts of the bedridden turn with piteous craving to the life outside their walls, it is upon deep, rain-soaked, wet moss, sprinkled with red toadstools or with brown leaves or with drifting gossamer seed, that they most covetously brood!

“You know what to expect from my nephew, Rachel, because you've seen him already,” went on Miss Crow. “If he doesn't treat our young poet with proper respect, you and I will squash him. He's not hard to put down, as you've seen, when a woman stands up to him,”

Rachel shifted her hoe from one hand to the other and lifting her young head, inhaled the moss-primrose odour upon those floating airs. She listened to the exultant trillings of the thrush from ihe unseen hushes in the neighbouring garden.

'“You are very kind to me, Miss Crow,” she said.

“Oh, and I've asked the Vicar,5' added [Miss Elizabeth apologetically. ”But there's not a hoy under heaven however sensitive who could mind him. He's as easy to manage as that queer, surly son of his you didn't like—is difficult. But even poor old Sam is nice when you approach him in the right way."

“Your nephewr won't abuse Mr. Geard, will he?'* said Lady Rachel. ”Ned will be rude to him if he does. Ned likes Mr. Geard as much as I do."

“Oh, you and I will see co that, child,” laughed Miss Crow. '“We'll be three to one; for Tilly doesn't count. The Mayor will be well championed, whatever Philip says!”

A couple of hours later and the little drawing-room facing Benedict Street was full of a lively party drinking tea and eating rock cakes. So strong, although so tactfully diffused, was Elizabeth Crow's protective aura, that not only were troublesome topics warded off, but the demonic influences from the great Powers of earth and air were prevented from touching her little group. Miss Elizabeth Crow not only pulled green-fringed muslin curtains across the little window, but she managed somehow to place her own substantial frame between her old friend and his flaming enemy, so that the Vicar—who was often obscurely worried and fretted in full sunlight—felt unusually happy that afternoon. There was a subtle reason for his happiness, too, in a motion of his consciousness of wThich he was thoroughly ashamed although its baseness, as he knew, had the grand excuse of so many base human feelings! Try as he might to take a larger, more generous, less professional view of the case, he had not been able to resist a spasm of ignoble jealous relief when he divined, as he soon did, for he and his son were in close accord, that some new twist in the latter's eccentric mind was keeping him apart from Nell Zoyland.

Ned Athling was certainly not the sort of youth that any ordinary girl would have fallen in love with. He was short and very fair, so fair indeed that his eyebrows and eyelashes seemed almost non-existent. He was much more ruggedly built than Dave 'Spear, another fair Saxon, and his hands, tanned and hardened by farm-work, were as large as they were powerful. A cloud of nervous timidity seemed to hover over him like smoke over burning weeds and he had a trick of casting down his full-lidded, eyebrowless eyes when anyone addressed him and staring intently at some spot, that conveniently besought attention, in the fabric of his trousers.

The May Day sunlight, modified by the green-edged muslin curtains, filtered agreeably into the little room. There was something piquant in the way Miss Crow had arranged her old pieces of furniture in this little working-man's parlour. The eighteenth-century chairs and tables, the seventeenth-century prints, mostly of sea-faring worthies and of old maps of the West Indies inherited from a Crow who had been a Norwich merchant in Cromwell's time, gave the room a rich and intricate look. This was increased by a vast amount of old china of which Miss Crow was particularly fond and the bulk of which had come to her from a Devereux aunt, a venerable maiden lady who had lived for half a century in the same small house, at Cromer in Norfolk.

There were primroses and cowslips and even bluebells about the room, all with much more greenery among them than was possessed by Jackie's bunch in the kitchen. The muslin curtains waved gently in the air that blew in from the street, where the very dust—recently allayed by a blue-painted water-cart inscribed “Town Council”—carried into the house a curious smell that resembled rain and yet was different from rain.

Miss Elizabeth, Tilly Crow and Lady Rachel had all chosen, by that human instinct which follows the weather almost as closely as do the hedge-weeds, especially airy and light-coloured dresses. Philip himself had put on a new fawn-tinted tie which looked well upon his heather-mottled suit, while Edward Athling had a newly budded meadow-orchid in his buttonhole, the first specimen of this flower that any of the rest of them were likely to see for several weeks yet.