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“Why do you say carts-and-crafts' so disparagingly, Sir?” threw in Edward Athling.

Elizabeth intervened. “I can explain that” she said. “When Philip was at Cambridge there was a lot of aesthetic tittle-tattle going on about that sort of thing. It's all very old-fashioned! You two children are too young to understand the point.”

“I can understand that Mr. Crow, being a manufacturer of machine-made articles, naturally has a dislike of hand-made things,” said Edward Athling, getting very red.

“Just as a farmer,” remarked Philip sternly, “naturally has a dislike of townspeople getting high wages.”

“What about this strike in the Dye-Works then? Isn't that for better wages?” The young man had scarcely uttered these impetuous words than he gave a curious kind of laugh and stretched out his hand to Philip, touching his sleeve. “Sorry, Sir,” he said. “That was an impertinent thing to say. I'm enough of a farmer to hate the way we ignoramuses rush into arguments. No doubt there's a lot to be said for your ideas of industry as something that gives the people steady employment, rather than just a dramatic adventure for the moment.”

“But the municipal factory is sure to last, isn't it?” insisted Rachel, noticing how stiff Philip was in the way he received Ned's gesture and feeling angry with Ned for making it.

Philip shrugged his shoulders in silence. “What I feel in all this,” said Mat Dekker, “is that Glastonbury needs both its scientific manufacturer and its dramatic Mayor.” Mat Dekker was so happy at this moment, being at once pampered by his ancient love and jealously pleased that his son was separated from Zoy-land's wife, that he uttered this peaceful remark with a certain careless unction, without thinking very much what he was saying.

Lady Rachel looked at him with flashing eyes. That smug antithesis—“its scientific manufacturer and dramatic Mayoi”— filled her with contempt.

Simple earthy natures like Mat Dekker, especially when they have, by luck, found themselves in a social position which cannot easily be menaced, frequently allow themselves to be dominated by their physical moods. When Mr. Dekker on this occasion threw out that smug remark about “scientific manufacturers and dramatic Mayors” il was in reality no more than if he had said—“It is May Day. I enjoy rock cakes. I am glad that my unaccountable desire for Nell Zoyland has been quieted by Sam's separation from her. I like being petted once more by dear old Elizabeth. Ifs nice here, now that she has shut the sun out.” Nothing that was being talked about just then touched —for Mat Dekker—the real essential things in life. He did not. in his heart of hearts, dunk that it mattered very greailv to Glas-tonbury, or to any immortal soul in Glastonbury. whether it were Mr. Crow or Mr. Geard who was cock of the dung-hill! And since this was the case, it was easy for him, treating Philip as he would have treated a greedy minnow in his aquarium, to give the man a soothing sop with the surface of his mind, and push the whole thing away from him as unimportant. But how was Lady Rachel, trembling with eager excitement in the presence of her first love and full of the intense partisanship of youth, to be tolerant of a hard-working priest's mental indolence? All that afternoon, as she had surveyed this big red-faced personage drinking so much tea and letting himself be waited upon by a gentle, elderly lady, she had suspected him of being a repulsive time-server and now she knew him for just that.

But Miss Elizabeth Crow was not one to be baffled by any clash of temperament among her guests or by anything as negligible as a flash of anger on the part of the excitable little daughter of Lord P. By the time her elder guests had departed she had beguiled them all into good temper. Indeed, both the young people were found making Tilly laugh with girlish delight by their antics with Tiger in the sunny doorway, when Elizabeth had finished saying good-bye to her other guests.

When Rachel and Ned Athling had reached the top of Chalice Hill they spent a happy quarter of an hour hunting about for that stone of which they had been told. At last, not greatly worried because they had not yet found it, they sat down together on a fallen log with the greenest of new-grown ferns and bracken at their feet and a sweet-smelling gorse bush behind them.

“Do you believe it was really here,” said Rachel, “that Merlin disappeared with the Grail?”

Ned did not reply for a second or two. Then he burst out irrelevantly—“You're like an Exmoor pony, Rachel, that's what you're like.”

“He wasn't a Christian,—was he, Ned? Merlin I raean. What was the Grail to him? That's what I can't imagine.”

“Rachel!”

“Yes, Ned.”

“Did you have a fear when you were little that you'd never meet anyone as exciting as the people in books?”

“Oh, Ned, how curious! How like we are! That's just what I always felt.” She picked a cowslip within reach of her arm and gave it to him. He smell at it and held it tight between his finger and thumb, waiting to hide it away in his pocket as soon as her attention wandered.

“May I ask you something, Ned?” was her next speech.

“If it's not about poetry, Rachel. Since I've known you I've been changing my ideas about what poetry is and it's got all confused.”

“No, it's nothing about poetry, it's------”

“Well, what is it, Rachel?”

“It's about people, one's own people. Don't you sometimes feel as if you were a changeling? Don't you sometimes feel that when your own people are talking and telling you this and that —quite ordinary things—that you're all the time living in a different world? I don't mean exactly a different place. The same place, only seen in quite a different way?”

“It's in that different way I've seen everything, Rachel, since I've known you. My horses, my cattle, my sheep, aren't the same creatures that they used to be. Of course those fields, down our way at Middlezoy, look the same as they always did but they look more the same, if you know what I mean. I mean I never knew before how different they are from all other fields and how much like themselves!”

“Could you ever endure to live anywhere else, Ned, than at Middlezoy?”

“I used to think I couldn't; but now—” he paused and plucked at the fern-like leaves of an incipient yarrow, “I believe I could live almost anywhere if I were absolutely sure of one thing.”

She refrained from pressing him as to what that “one thing” was.

“I suppose you've sunk your soul into those fields at Middlezoy!”

“Well, even if I have, I could pull my soul out again. i:u:ildift I, like anyone might pull out a deep thorn?”

“I didn't want >ou to say you could. I wanted vju to say you couldn't.”

The log they were seated upon was not large enough for anv space to exist between them. At those moments in the conversation when one or other of them would naturally have indicated a psychic misunderstanding by a physical withdrawal, all the\ could do was to move their knees or their feet a trifle further away from those of the other. The girl shifted her legs a little now and in this slight movement the profile of her cheek was turned. Ned snatched the opportunity and slipped the cowslip into his waistcoat pocket.

The magic of that moment, the scent of the primroses and the damp moss, the tremulous ecstasy of the birds and insects, the unusual greenness that washed up against their feet like a wave of the primal sap of creation, covered them now as a couple of early violets might be covered, by lush transparent overgrowths that guard and enhance their poignant breath.

“If you and I were ever, by any chance, to marry, Ned. should we live at Middlezoy?”

“Would you marry me, Rachel?”

“I might, Ned. But you mustn't take this as a promise! Besides, what am I saying? I am acting as forwardly as Juliet did! But we must see each other a lot more, lots and lots more, before we can know for certain that we dare do it.”

Edward Athling sighed deeply, a profound sadness took the place of the excitement he had just felt. The way she'd spoken— though anything but frivolous—had not been exactly the kind of ambrosial food that a lover demands.

“Don't get glum, Ned. Let's pretend! Would we live at Middlezoy?”

“What do you mean?” he asked. “With my parents?”

She didn't like to tell him—for fear of hurting his feelings— that that had not been her dream. Her dream included a thatched cottage at Middlezoy down close by one of those great rhynes where the otters were found.

But she now plunged boldly on—“With them for a while. Ned, perhaps, till we had money enough to have a farm of our own.”

A farm of their own! This phrase of hers was so delicious, so filled with a floating incense of enchantment, that for a second he dallied with it as if it were serious.

But it was not serious; none of it was serious! He had against him before he could marry the daughter of the great Wessex nobleman such a solid weight of conventional obstacles that it seemed madness to think about it. Noblemen's daughters had married commoners before now, but not often—and as far as all accounts went—never a Zoyland! He wasn't an adventurer, he wasn't a rascally pilgarlic like one of those lean rogues lambasted in Rabelais who set their scurvy wits to deface, deflower, debauch and abduct, some, sweet-blooded noble wench of an ancient breed.

“It would only be for a time,” she began again, “that I'd have to live with your people. We should soon be able to find a place, somewhere near Middlezoy anyhow, with a few acres that would suit us.”

“Oh, please stop, Rachel! Please stop!” His voice was really tormented and the girl looked at him in astonishment. “You simply donH know what you're talking about,” he went on irritably. “It's impossible to imagine—for one second—your living with my parents; impossible, I tell you; impossible!”

“I don't understand you,” she said. “Oh, well! Anyhow we haven't to consider it just yet. We'll have many a lovely time together, Ned—before we have to consider it. So don't look so sad!” But she herself sighed long and deep, as she looked across at Glastonbury Tor.

Ned moved now. He had been vaguely conscious for several minutes that every time he leaned back his shoulders encountered the prickles of the gorse bush under which lay their log. It occurred to him that his companion, whose clothes were thinner than his, might be suffering from these gorse prickles. He twisted his head round, yes! they must be pricking her shoulders! He jumped up and pulled her to her feet with him.

“Too near the gorse,” he murmured. He had only grasped her arm, but his touch sent an electric vibration through her, a quivering like that which sometimes seizes upon one single tree-twig when everything else is still.

“I wonder how long it's been lying there,” she said, “it's very old.”

Both the young people gazed down at their recent seat. The log was certainly very old. Neither of them could tell what port of a tree it had once been, or even if it had once grov*n near where it lay. It was covered with dark moss and grey lichen, and at one end of it was a cluster of little yellowish toadstools.

“It may have been here hundreds of years,” she whispered. A rush of thoughts, vague and indistinct, but full of a curious pleasure, floated through her mind. How many people, old and young, must have passed this way and glanced at that old log— long before she was born! A sense of the wistful and terrible beauty of life took possession of her—especially of life lived long and quietly in one place.

“Fd like to grow slowly old, day by day, very gradually, older and older,” she said.

Ned looked at her with his forehead gathered in great puckers. She looked incredibly childish in her long straight dress and black straw hat.

“I suppose you never know what you mightn't find buried on this hill,” he said. “I am glad the Mayor's going to buy the house where the red spring is and build an arch. He talked a lot to me, when you were gone last time, about an arch. He's got into his head that a Saxon arch would be the thing, but someone, the Vicar I think, had told him there weren't such things as Saxon arches.”

“I hate that Vicar,” said the girl fiercely.

“Oh, come now, Rachel! He's not a bad old codger. He told me, as we were going out of the house, that he collected butterflies.”

“Just what he icould do!” cried Lady Rachel. “Think of killing a thing like that!” And she pointed to a somnolent Meadow Brown that was fluttering over the green bracken.

“I used to collect butterflies when I was young,” said Athling gravely.

“All the more shame to you!” She longed to scold him, to agitate him, to make him feel troubled in his mind. Not necessarily about butterflies—about anything! The sun, slanting now from the west, was drawing out every kind of fragrance from that hill-slope, but the wandering airs that stirred the curls under her hat were full of the scent of primroses and moss. Bees kept flying by them; and every now and then a great blue-bottle fly drummed past their ears, with that peculiar come-and-gone quiver of tiny wings that holds a whole summer in its sound.

“I sometimes feel,” he said, with an evident struggle in his mind to tell her something that was hard to express, “that it's a weakness of mine to go on writing poetry about what I enjoy and what is so easy to describe. New forms are coming into art, drawn from inventions and machinery,—well! you know more about that than I do, having been to Paris and so on—and drawn too, anyone can see, from the life of people in masses, working people in masses; and I sometimes feel as if there were something babyish in going on with the old country themes, with the old love and death themes, when the other arts are following the new way.”

He had given her her opportunity! With burning cheeks and gesticulating hands, she freely attacked him now, all the stirrings of her love transferred to her argument.

“It's pure snobbishness, what you're talking about,” she cried. “You say to yourself, CI must be modern,' when you ought only to say, 'I want to find out how to express what I feel.5”

He looked at her gravely. “But isn't it important to keep in touch with the World-Spirit? I feel somehow, Rachel, as if all these Grail stories, all this mediaeval mysticism, had grown tiresome and antiquated.”

“You'd better ask Philip Crow to give you a ride in his airplane!” Her voice was quivering. Had she come down here from listening to all this talk in London only to find her Ned repeating iL?