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He rose to his feet as he said. this. But Philip rose too. “You misunderstood me, Mr. Crow,” he said sharply. “It was only a bedroom I was unable to offer you.” He paused for a second while a flicker of unconcealed distaste crossed his features. “But of course you are jesting. Anyway you're free to enjoy which you please ... a hot supper at the Inn or a cold supper with us here. Well!” he added in a different tone, “Pve got some writing to do; and I think I'll desert you all now and do it in the study.”

There was a general movement to leave the table at this point and under the protection of the confusion John whispered to Mary, "Look here, I'm not coming up here again. That beggar hates me comme le diablel You come, tomorrow morning, after breakfast, and call for me at the Inn. Ha? I'll find out if we

can't get a boat on the 'big river'------ Anyway, you tell Aunt Elizabeth that you're off for the day. How long are you going to stay here?"

But, woman-like, Mary went straight to the main issue. “What time shall I call for you, John?”

“Oh, about ten, if that's not too early? That'll give me time to find out about the boat”

She gave him a peculiar look. It was a steady calm look. Above all it was a stripped look. It held his attention for a second; but he missed everything about it that was important. He missed its touching confidence, its bone-to-bone honesty. He missed its unquestioning, little-girl reliance upon him. He missed its weariness, he missed its singleness of heart.

“You won't change your mind, John, and start off for Glas-tonbury at dawn?”

It was his turn now to reveal, in an eyelid-flicker of self-abandonment, the animal-primitive basis of his nature. It had evidently crossed his mind, in his reaction from the pressure of the family, that it would be nice to escape and be upon the road alone! His face betrayed all this; but the newly born maternal tenderness in her tone expressed itself in such a gleam of humorous indulgence that he was lifted up out of the shame of having been caught in such a treachery, on a delicious wave of sheer repose upon her understanding.

“No, I won't change my mind,” he whispered, “but don't let anything they say keep you from coming, Mary.”

“I think I can get you a little more money for—for the road, John,” she said hurriedly.

He treated this with the decisive gesture of a strong man showing off before a weak girl. “I'll be very angry if you do,” he said. “Nothing would make me take it! So it's better not to waste breath.”

Both dining-room and drawing-room and the hall and the passage outside these rooms were now left to themselves. Silent and alone too the now-darkened conservatory listened to the placid sub-human breathings of heliotrope and lemon verbena, the latter with a faint catch in its drowsy susurration, where one of its twigs was bleeding a little from the impact of the fingers of the indignant Mr. Didlington.

Silent and alone the broad staircase fell into that trance of romantic melancholy which was its invariable mood when the hall lamp was first lit. The oil paintings upon its walls looked out from their gilt frames with that peculiar expression of indrawn expectancy—self-centred and yet patiently waiting—of which human passers-by catch only the psychic echo or shadow or after-taste, for a single flicker of a second, as if they had caught them off-guard.

Of all these rooms the one thai now x'ell into the most intense attitude of strained expectancy was the drawing-room . . . “You ought to have been older than all your brothers, woman, instead of younger.” The words emanated from a pale, insubstantial husk upon the air, a husk that resembled the cast-off skin of a snake or the yet more fragile skin of a newt, diaphanous and yet flaccid, a form, a shape, a human transparency, limned upon the darkness above the great chair to the left of the fireplace. The words were almost as faint as the sub-human breathings of the plants in the conservatory. They were like the creakings of chairs after people have left a room for hours. They were like the opening and shutting of a door in an empty house. They were like the groan of a dead branch in an unfrequented shrubbery at the edge of a forsaken garden. They were like the whistle of the wind in a ruined clock-tower, a clock-tower without bell or balustrade, bare to the rainy sky, white with the droppings of jackdaws and starlings, forgetful of its past, without a future save that of anonymous dissolution. They were like words murmured in a ruined court where water fri>m broken cisterns drips disconsolately upon darkening stones, while one shapeless idol talks to another shapeless idol as the night falls. They were like the murmurs of forgotten worm-eaten boards, lying under a dark, swift stream, boards that once were the mossy spokes of some old water-mill and in their day have caught the gleam of many a morning sun but now are hardly noticeable even to swimming water-rats. No sooner were these words uttered, than a simulacrum in human form, seated opposite to the shade of the Rector returned a bitter response.

"A cruel coward is what you are, William Crow, and what you've always been; but if ever, when I am dead, you leave your money to anyone but Philip's son I will punish you with a punishment ivorse than God's V

While these words were being uttered the thin wraith from whom they came became lividly accentuated in its facial outlines which were of a ghastly pallor and hideously emaciated; but at the close, while she was actually crying out “worse than God's”' not a vestige of her lineaments remained visible.

The other wraith too, in the chair opposite, although a faint film of his identity survived hers by two or three seconds, soon likewise faded. The chairs, the pictures, the ornaments on the mantelpiece were already lost in darkness. The fire was now nearly extinct. The only glimmer it was able to throw, in feebler and feebler jets from a little blue flame that kept racing along a charred bit of burnt wood, fell upon a tall, gilded screen painted with mythological figures. These intermittent flickerings soon died down in a dusky red spot that illuminated nothing and itself became dimmer and dimmer.

One of the big windows had been opened by Tilly Crow “to air the room” wThile they all went to their tea; and through this window the presence of the night flowed in. Sweet-scented, obliterating, equalising, it flowed in, taking the bitterness from defeat, taking the triumph from victory, and diffusing through the air an essence of something inexplicable, something beyond hope and beyond despair, full of pardon and peace.

THE RIVER

When Mary arrived at the New Inn, punctually at ten o'clock, with their lunch tied up in white paper in a basket, she found John Crow seated on a bench outside the entrance, with two oars and a long boat-hook lying across his knees.

The wind had sheered round to due south and what there was of it was faint-blowing. The sky was covered with an opalescent vapour; the sun was warm; and the wandering odours that were wafted towards the girl from the neighbouring cottages had a sweetness in them beyond the pungency of burning peat; a sweetness that may have come from the new buds in the privet hedges, or from the dug-up earth clods in the little gardens at the back, where the spades and forks of the men still stood fixed in the ground awaiting their return when the day's work was over.

He rose with alacrity to welcome her, the two oars in one hand, the boat-hook in the other. “I've got the key,” he announced triumphantly. “It's at the end of Alder Dyke on the big river. They say we'd better go there by Foul den Bridge.” He lowered his voice and bent down his head. “Did any of them try to slop you coming? Did Philip say anything?”

She shook her head and stood for a moment without moving, her face averted, looking dreamily down the street. “This will never happen to me again,” she thought. “I am in love with him. He is in love with me. I shall never forget this day and I shall never feel just like this ever again, whatever happens.” She turned towards John. “I don't care where you take me,” her look said, “or what you do with me, as long as we are together!” But her lips said, “Do you mind going in and getting some more of that wine, John? I didn't want to make my basket too heavy, so I left on the table the bottle of milk that Aunt Elizabeth made me take.”

He propped up the oars and the boat-hook against the house and went in. Mary moved away, crossed to the other side of the road and lending over a low brick wall stared at a manure-heap in which three black hens were scratching. The manure-heap with the three black fowls became at that second a sort of extension of her own personality. She felt at that moment, as she rested her basket on the top of the wall and heedless of her sleeves stretched her arms along its surface and ran her bare fingers through the cool stone-crop stalks, as if her soul was scarcely attached to her body. Almost without allowing her happy trance to be broken she took down her basket from the wall, recrossed the road and met John at the instant he emerged. “Sorry to have kept you,” he chuckled, “but I've made them give me a flask of brandy as well as a flask of port. That's the best of having a greatcoat on, even on a hot day. Its pockets are so useful.”

They walked rapidly now side by side past the churchyard and past the gardener's cottage at the drive-gate where Ben Pod had counfed the cars. They came to a narrow foot-way that led them across the little river by a bridge that was scarcely more than a plank, and after that across the fields to the big river. Here at Foulden Bridge, which they did not cross, they debouched from the path; and turning to the left, followed the river bank downstream.

They had not spoken a word since leaving the Inn. Mary grew conscious, just before they got to Foulden Bridge, that she had been repeating to herself as she walked along, “That's the best of a greatcoat on a hot day. Its pockets are so useful.” What she had been thinking was, how bony and thin was John's hand as it clutched the boat-hook which s^ung horizontally between them like an antique spear.

John was delving in his memory for lumething; something important. There had been several patches of yellow marigolds along the path they had followed and these had excited a tantalising feeling in his mind that he could not fathom. Those gleaming yellow flowers kept leading his memory to the verge of something and then deserting him and turning into a blur of blackness! Tom Barter had to do with it; but it was not Barter. This preoccupation with an obscure past, although it made him grave and silent, did not lessen his delight in his companion's presence. They were indeed, both of them, thrillingly happy, these two flesh-covered skeletons, drifting so lingeringly along the banks of the Wissey, but John's happiness was much more complicated than Mary's. His return Lo his native land played a part in it; the revival of local memories played a sLill larger part; and this latter feeling was so intimately associated with Tom Barter that to oust that sturdy figure from its place was impossible. He kept reverting to the marigolds, especially to their stalks in muddy water, and he kept thinking too of the stickiness of certain lumps of flour-dough mixed with cotton-wool and •^eacle that Tom and he had used for bait for roach and dace. Perch, that more rapacious fish, despised these harmless pellets; and he wondered whether it could be the black stripes of these deep-water fish and their enormous mouths, or the stickiness of this bait for the others, or a certain kind of homemade ginger-beer that their grandfather's cook used to make, and not the marigolds at all, that had been the tap-root lo his rapturous sensation. It was not that this tantalising sense of being on the edge of some incredible life-secret interfered with his feeling for Mary. It was that his possession of Mary had become a calm-flowing tidal-stream which released and expanded all the antennae of his nature. These responses leapt up towards the unknown, like those great, slippery fish at Harrod's Mill. Tom Barter, marigold-stalks, fish-scales, dough-pellets—all these, and the secret they held, depended, like the long shining river-weeds upon which his eye now rested, upon the flow of that stream of contentment which was his possession of Mary.

They were walking now very close to the river bank and it was not long before they reached Dye's Hole. This spot was really a series of deep holes in the bed of the Wissey where the stream made a sweeping curve. Over these dark places in the swirling water bent the trunks of several massive willow trees and between these trees and the edge of the stream there was a winding path, too narrow to be trodden by horses and cattle but interspersed with muddy footholds and beaten-down clearings amid the last year's growths, where it was just possible for two people to stand close together having the willow trunks behind them and the dark water in front.

John stopped when he reached the largest of these little clearings, and standing on the trodden mud balanced the two oars and the boat-hook against the branches of an elder bush which hung over a narrow ditch on the side of their path opposite to the river. Then he turned round and facing Dye's Hole waited for the girl to come up. The back of his head touched the vivid green shoots of a gigantic willow tree whose roots, like great thirsty serpents, plunged below the flowing water. As soon as the girl reached him he took her basket from her and laid it down on the ground, taking care to place it where a fragment of an old post, of dark, rotting wood pierced by three rusty nails, would prevent it from toppling over into the ditch. As he placed it there he chanced to touch, between it and the post, a newly grown shoot of water mint; and at once a wafture of incredible aromatic sweetness reached his brain.

They both stood still and gazed round them. “I wonder if you and I will ever see all this again?” he said.

“It's home to me,” she said.

“It's home to both of us,” concluded John; and the two of them as if they were one flesh drank up in great satisfying draughts the whole essence of that characteristic spot. With the same unspoken understanding that had brought their thoughts together before, the girl's hat and the man's cap were now thrown together on the earth at their feet and they gave themselves up to a protracted love-making. What was remarkable about this love-making was that during all their embraces, in which the man held her and caressed her, first with her body front to front against his, and then with her face turned towards the river, their male and female sensuality—he “possessing” and she being “possessed”—was, in its earth-deep difference, of exactly the same magnetic quality. This was not due to his experience or to her inexperience; for, in these matters, Nature, the great mother of all loves, equalised them completely. It was due to some abysmal similarity in their nerves which, after making them fall in love, made them “make love” in exactly the same manner! There always remained the unfathomable divergence, in their bodies, in their minds, in their souls, due to their being male and female; but their similarity of feeling was the exciting element sounding the depths of ever-new subtleties in this deliciousness of like-in-unlike.