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“You'd better go over to Wookey Hole and see the remarkable electricity they've installed there. And if you're interested in machines there are some fine up-to-date ones in Crow's Dye-Works! You'd better go to Philip Crow and tell him how impressed you are by his great industrial undertaking!”

“What has made you so angry with me, Ladv Rachel? What have I done? It was since I've known you that I've erown dissatisfied with my poetry, so full of all the old tags: it's since Fve known you that Fve wanted to make it more original, more subtle, more in line with our times!”

Her face was a picture to see, as she struggled with her contending feelings*

“I don't want you to alter at all; not in anything!” she cried.

“I wish you hadn't made me talk about my poetry/' he said. ”I had a feeling it would annoy you."

“It hasn't annoyed me! Only standing on this hill where Merlin was and everything—I feel as if you were taking the wrong turn. You spoke up so splendidly for Mr. Geard just now in that house and now you seem to be taking the other side.”

“What's poetry got to do with taking sides? Poetry is an art.”

“Oh, don't use that word, Ned! If you'd heard what I've heard—the talk—the affectations—the boredom------”

“But isn't it an art?”

Her reply was almost screamed at him.

“No! It isntl It's Poetry. Poetry's something entirely different. Oh, I know I'm right, Ned! If you go and get hold of this horrible modern idea that poetry is an art, I don't know what------”

She stopped and clasped her hands behind her back.

“Well, anyway, Lady Rachel,” he said, “it has nothing to do with this Glastonbury quarrel between Geard and Crow.”

“It has. It has everything to do with it! Can't you feel, Ned, as we stand here that this place is magical? What's Poetry if it isn't something that has to fight for the unseen against the seen, for the dead against the living, for the mysterious against the obvious? Poetry always takes sides. It's the only Lost Cause we've got left! It fights for the . . . for the . . . for the Impossible!”

Young Athling answered in a mumbling, muttering voice. He stooped down and picking up a bent stick that lay on the grass, flicked his boots with it. “It was meeting you that started me thinking of these things; and now you go and ride over me. I tell you, Lady Rachel------”

“Don't be silly. Call me Rachel!”

“I tell you,” he went on, “I want my poetry to be a new, living original thing. I want it to deal with machinery and inventions! It's all very well”—he kept flicking his ankles harder and harder with the stick he had picked up—“to go on writing about Middle-zoy hedges and ditches and Sedgemoor tombstones, but I want my writing to flow forward, where life is flowing.”

The girl's face grew stern and very sad. Not realising what he was doing to her, young Athling had outraged something in her that was almost as deep as her love for him, that was indeed mingled with her love for him, and was one of the causes of it. “Ned, listen to me,” she said. “Fve heard all about this quarrel between Mr. Geard and Mr. Crow. It's been mounting up and mounting up till it's become, like the Montagus and Capulets, something you can't escape from. If you and I are to go on seeing each other we must agree about this. It's . . . it's dangerous not to agree about it.” She uttered these last words in a low solemn tone.

Ned Athling looked at her in bewildered astonishment. To his mind it was simply unbelievable that she should take seriously— even to the point of quarreling with him—these ridiculous local politics of Glastonbury. He did not realise how deep in her inherited Zoyland blood the passion for causes and statecraft and for all the transactions in what is called History went. He suddenly felt that it was incumbent upon him, at all costs, to change their topic of discourse. She herself had called it “dangerous” and it evidently tvas dangerous. He looked down at their log. It was not only invaded by the gorse prickles, but it was now covered by the shadow of the gorse bush.

“Do you say I could lift that log,” he said, “or do you say I couldn't?”

“I say you mustn't, because it's been there so long, Ned, and has all those funguses on it!” But she now gave him the first smile he had had since they got up from their seat on that log. He threw away the stick he had picked up and his cap after it. He bent down and handled the log, tugging at it first in one direction and then in the other. It only moved a few inches. It was deeply buried in the grass and hundreds of infinitesimal weeds grew at its sides. He knelt down, the better to get purchase, and Lugged at it. It moved a few inches and then fell back into its bed of a hundred years.

“You can't, Ned! It's silly to try to do something that you can't do. Let the old thing alone, please, Ned . ? . please . . . I ask you to!”

But he did not heed her. He now straddled across the log and, bending low down, his feet planted deep upon the grass* he folded his hands under one end of the thing, slipping his fingers carefully through the w7eeds so as not to disturb the toadstools, scratching his knuckles on various little roots, but at last getting a really strong hold upon it.

The girl was watching him now with rivetted attention. Her hands hanging loose at her sides, began plucking nervously at her belt, and with one of her feet she tapped at the ground. Ath-ling possessed the muscles of a farm-labourer. All his life, since he had revolted at leaving home and had only gone to a dame's school in a neighbouring village, he had done heavy manual labour; but he now tugged and strained at this wayward enterprise to no avail. All he could do was just to tilt up the end of the log about half an inch. But he had not yet made full use of his shoulders or of the muscles of his flanks. Drawing a deep breath and balancing his feet firmly on each side of the log he grappled with it again. It began to move. It moved. No! Settling itself down again with a weight of gravitation that seemed abnormal, and as it were intentional, the log slipped from his hands and subsiding into its former position lay there inert, motionless, triumphant. He had failed.

“Don't 'ee mind, Ned.” cried the girl, coming towards him and touching his shoulder with her bare hand. That touch was, as it were, the sweet accolade of the defeated! It was the first time in their experience of each other that she had made such a gesture, and at a good moment did she make it now.

“Avanti!” she said, “we must hunt for that stone! Soon we shall be late for Miss Crow's supper.”

Not a word did he speak as he walked by her side across the hill. Humiliation gnawed at his midriff like a rat at a thick sweet-smelling board in an old barn.

She was nice about it. She had said, “Don't 'ee mind, Ned”— and had touched him with her hand; but it was not her pity he wanted; he wanted her admiration; he wanted her respect; he wanted her hero-worship.

“It'll be a shame to. keep Tossie waiting,” she said suddenly. “But listen; if we didn't bother about the stone any more we could go round by the Two Oaks. There'll be plenty of time, if we go back by Bove Town and straight down High Street. Oh, let's do that, Ned.”

At this point, while several invisible blackbirds were answering one another from the purple dislance, Lady Rachel offered the boy her hand.

“Let's run down,” she whispered.

Athling proved to be more skilful in guiding a girl past mole-hills and rabbit-holes, as they stumbled down that uneven slope, than he had been at lifting logs for her sake. Their speed gathered and gathered till they were racing with dangerous rapidity through bracken and bent, past thorn bushes and gorse thickets, over elm stumps, under red-barked Scotch firs, by little clumps of elder, mingled with holly. He guided her so well that they reached the bottom without mishap.

“Let's go to the Oaks before we hit the road,” she whispered, slipping her warm ungloved hand out of his and shaking the seeds and straws from her skirt.

He would have gone further than to the Oaks “before they hit the road” if it meant the prolonging of their day. That holding her hand had given him such oblivious satisfaction that all he wanted now was to remain at her side and forget both grass-grown logs and Ambrosianus Merlinus.

“Oh, there are people there!” cried Rachel, “what a pity! Well, we'll go straight to the road now and get home. We should probably have made ourselves late if we'd gone down there.”

The “people” Lady Rachel had seen were, as a matter of fact, none other than Sam and Nell.

Will Zoyland had been warned of a crowd of sightseers expected at Wookey on this May Day, though it was no official holiday, so he had written to Nell putting off a visit home which he had proposed to make. Nell had promptly communicated with Sam and they had arranged a meeting at ihis spot. Nell had only just this moment arrived. Had Athling and Rachel scrambled down the hill five minutes sooner they would have found only Sam there.

“Dear Sam, oh, my dear Sam,” the girl was saying now. “I had to see you again because I must have given you a wrong impression when I came over yesterday. I didn't mean to worry you, Sam, or cling to you when you don't want me, but when youVe given a person a wrong impression you feel you have to do something. I couldn't sleep last night with thinking what Fd said. It was wrong of me to get so angry and to say all those wild things. I didn't really mean what I said, you know, Sam. A person can say things like that without really meaning them.”

Sam took her hand and lifting it to his mouth, kissed it long and hungrily. He had made a rule for himself that he mustn't kiss her on the lips. “I was thinking about you all last night, Nell,” he said, “I couldn't sleep till dawn. There's a great deal I want to tell you about.”

“Were you really thinking of me, Sam? Oh, Sam,” and a look of wild hope came into her eyes, “were you thinking that perhaps------”

“Let's find some place to sit down,” he said. “There's a cowshed back there, half full of hay. I noticed it as I came along. Let's go and sit in there for a bit. I mustn't smoke there—that's the only thing—but that doesn't matter.”

The look of hope that had come into Nell's face vanished. There was nothing in his tone to suggest any change of purpose. But she let him lead her along the lane. He led her in the opposite direction from that Wick Wood where Jackie and his band had picked the bluebells and into which she had herself gazed this afternoon as she skirted it in her walk to this spot.

He led her to a gap in the hedge through which it was possible to reach a large field that was lying fallow. Across this field he led her, their shadows making long monumental outlines that were scarcely human as the rays of the sinking sun fell on their backs. These two vast shadows moved in front and Nell and Sam followed behind. It was a silent procession in that isolated field full of so much old corn stubble and so many small green weeds; for the two inhuman shadows spoke not nor made any sign and the two solid figures behind them were also silent. The shadows were, however, luckier than the figures, for they had the power of overlapping with each other and merging and mixing with each other, so that they frequently lost themselves in each other. This desirable power was denied the human figures who now followed after them, silent, solemn and tragic,— two Solids following two Shadows across the dead stubble and the green weeds.

Nell felt a spasm of bitter sadness as she watched these elongated shadows intermingling in front of them and then separating again and growing distinct. All over this part of the country, she thought, there are shadows accompanying people, some of them in front, some of them behind. And their appearance is the same whatever is going on in the hearts of the figures that throw them. People going to be executed, people going to deathbeds, people going to bury their dead—their shadows look the same. Shadows, thought Nell, have no hearts. Shadows are like men who have decided to follow Christ and to leave their loves and their loves' children!

He led her into that cowshed which he knew of. Yes! it was, as he had said, half full of last year's hay. He made her sit down on a heap of loose hay with her back to more hay tied in bundles, and he himself sat down by her side. They remained silent for a minute or two, and then, with an instinct to put off their serious talk, he began telling her of various occurrences in town. He told her that there were rumours that Philip Crow was trying to obtain some legal injunction to stop Mr. Geard's Midsummer Pageant. He told her that there had been a fierce quarrel at the new Municipal Factory between Mr. Barter and some of the Communists, led by Red Robinson.

Nell's heart sank lower and lower as she listened to him. “How can he? Oh, how can he?” she thought. “He isn't a cruel man— he isn't doing it to hurt me. How can he take me into this place and then talk like this?”

The field they had crossed, with the wide horizon behind it, and with Brent Knoll rising in the distance out of the northwest, was framed in the oblong doorway of the shed. The framing turned the scene they now looked upon into a curious “work of art,” isolating it from the rest of Nature, and giving it a symbolic significance. The sun was now almost gone. It had become a red, globular excrescence on the horizon. It resembled a Glas-tonbury Tor from which St. Michael's Tower had been cut by some celestial sword-stroke, soaking the hill with blood redder than human blood. Slowly this bleeding convexity sank down over the edge of the horizon. Apparently it sank into Bridge-water Bay, into the Bristol Channel, into that South Wales from which came Mr. Evans, Mrs. Geard, and the “foreign” stones of Stonehenge; but at any rate it no longer occupied the central position in that arbitrary picture produced by the door-frame of the cowshed. Brent Knoll, however, still remained—remained till the twilight mists arose out of the watery flats of Weston-super-mare and hid it, and the horizon with it, from the eyes of Nell and Sam.

“Sam, I must talk to you about it; I must; I have to. Sam, you can't really mean to go on with your life in Glastonbury as if we had never met—as if we didn't belong to each other—as if we hadn't got . . . now ... a new life ... to think about, to consider, to------”

“Dearest, listen—listen to me!” he interrupted. “I've been thinking all the time ... all last night I was thinking . . . till I couldn't think any more ... of some way ... of something I could do ... of something we both could do. I know I can't make you feel, as I feel it, this—this struggle of mine . . . but I've come to see ... in the last few days . . . that I've shirked something ... in us ... in our feeling for each other ... in the child.”