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As she told this story to Percy, Percy could not help feeling, as she looked at the transparency of this white face by her side, that the girl herself might well have been named Blodenwedd!

Lovely were they botfi, as they lay there in that glimmering light, but whereas Angela seemed to draw to herself from out of the storm-cleansed darkness everything that was pallid and phantasmal in the rain-soaked meadows, in the dripping hazel-spinneys, in the cold, moss-covered hill slopes, Persephone seemed, as she lay listening to her friend, as if she were an incarnation of all the magic of the brown rain-pools and the smooth-washed beech boughs and the drenched, carved eaves of fragrant woodwork, and the wet reed roofs of the dyke-hovels down there in the marshes of ike Brue.

“I believe I know who you are in these Grail stories!” Angela was now whispering. “You are Lorie de la Roche Florie, the mistress of Gawain!”

“Pve not found him yet, anyway,” smiled the other.

“He says,” whispered Angela, “Mr. Evans says, that Mayor Geard is really in league with the old magical Powers, and that the new inscription theyVe found on Chalice Hill has to do with Merlin, and not with Saint Joseph at all!”

The girl's Madonna-like face had a flaming spot on both her cheeks and her breath came in quick gasps as these hurried syllables left her lips.

But Percy listened languidly. Her lonely, unsettled, restless soul had not yet found what she craved. “Perhaps,” she was thinking now, “what I want is not in this world at all!” Something in her anyway—probably her sceptical Norfolk blood— felt profoundly suspicious of all this chatter about the old gods. She liked flirting—if her ambiguous relations with the Welshman could be called by that name—with Mr. Evans, but his Cymric mythology left her absolutely cold. She fancied she had made the discovery of late that there was a certain type of nature that could not enjoy life in a frankly amorous, or honestly vicious way, but must be always complicating the issue by bringing into it all sorts of half-mystical, half-religious notions.

While the fair girl continued her esoteric whisperings with burning cheeks and eyes growing brighter and brighter, Percy was thinking to herself, “If Dave would do nothing but talk about Communism in his curious way I could live with him forever. If Philip would go on driving me in his car sans cesse, I could live with himl And it's going to be just the same with you, my angel, only the other way round! I like your being fond of me but your ideas wear me out. What a wild, excited way she's whispering now! God bless me! Owen Evans hasn't discovered any new sins that aren't practised every day among people whoVe never heard of his Guardians of the Grail or his Daughters of King Avallach!”

She knew that the dim light from their little night-light fell upon her face, and she knew that the other's spasmodic outburst of hot, quick, excited words would cease in a second and the girl's feelings be cruelly wounded if she realised the effect she was having. So, born actress as she was, Percy assumed an expression of exhausted but responsive intentness. But her soul wandered far away.

Ned Athling, who had come to know her quite well during their rehearsals together, had introduced her recently to Lady Rachel, and Rachel's passionate love of old ballad-poetry and Ber hatred of everything modern, had amused her not a little. The image of Rachel hovered now very clearly before her mind. Mr. Evans' pupil in mysticism would have been staggered and her heart stabbed had she been able to read her friend's thoughts.

Taliessin and Aneurin, Bendigeitvran, or Bran the Blessed, Terre Gastee and Balyn's Dolorous Stroke, Arawn, King of Hades, Caer Pedryvan, where PwylFs Cauldron was found by the heathen Arthur, the Mwys of Gwydno-Garanhir. without which Kulhwch might never have Olwen to his bed—all these would, have sunk down into the sluices of nothingness, into the weirs o£ oblivion, if the fair girl had known the bitter truth!

So the exhausted and intently smiling brown-skinned mask listened to her friend's voice, but beneath it the girl's unsatisfied soul wandered off far into the darkness. Over the head of Mr. Barter it wTandered, as he weighed his whiskey against his ale, over the house of Dr. Fell, it wandered, where the word murder had been so lately breathed, over the Mayor's bedroom it wandered, where Mr. Geard could still derive amorous pleasure from embracing Megan, over the sleeping head of Sam in his Vicarage room, over the tossing, sleepless head of Sam's begetter, in his room, out, far out, away from all these people, awTay from all these roofs, covering desire and torment and rapture and lechery and despair and paradisiac peace, it wandered free,—free of them all, free even of the body of its own possessor, but still unsatisfied, still wanting something that no flesh and blood could fulfil,—something “that might not be in the world at all,” or at least so hidden that none could find it.

THE MIRACLE

Just one word, Mr, Mayor,“ said Dr. Fell as he stood with his hand on the window of Solly Lew's taxi. ”I must have it completely understood that, as this woman's medical adviser, I refuse to give my consent to your taking her."

“Quite right, Doctor,” replied Mr. Geard from inside the vehicle, where he was supporting the groaning Tittie, “I receive your protest. Mr. Crow here and my daughter are your witnesses. I take full responsibility.” He raised his voice. “You want to come, don't you, Mrs. Petherton?”'

“Yes, yes! Oh, Lord! Anything. Oh, Lord! For to make thee stop; for to make thee stop even for a little while, Lord! Yes, yes. Oh, there thee be again!”

The tortured woman had come recently to talk to her cancer as if it were a living person. She called it “Lord”; for it represented the nearest and most wilful power she knew. It was this peculiarity that had begun to get on the nerves of the worthy Nurse Robinson and was one of the chief reasons why she had asked to be relieved from her task. “ Twill be better for hevery one concerned, for 'er to 'ave a change.” she had said when Mat Dekker who had made himself responsible for the nurse's salary protested at this decision. “She'd be far better horf in the 'ors-pital,” she said. And it was this word, overheard by the patient a week ago, that had now made it essential that there should be a change, for, after this, the woman's feeling towards the nurse was like what a heretic would feel towards an Inquisition official. The frightened Tittie would not let her come near her without screaming.

“I'll bring house down if yer moves a step!” she threatened; and once she had begun shrieking and struggling so terribly that the neighbours had run in and made a scene.

“Drive on, Solly!” commanded Mr. Geard.

Crummie and John, sitting opposite the two principals in this strange event, kept up together—under cover of the unhappy creature's groans—a rapid exchange of comments.

“She's too far gone,” said John. "That's what I'm afraid of. If she weren't so far gone she might help him by her faith in him. But she's beyond that!7'

“He doesn't care what she thinks, if only he can get her there!” gasped Crummie, wincing with sympathy at every movement the woman made.

“I can't make him out,” said John. “:He doesn't seem worked up over it. You saw what a good dinner he ate . . . all that Yorkshire pudding! Yd feel happier about it if he were more stirred up. Could you imagine a worse hour of the day for such an experiment? There's St. John's church striking half-past two now.”

“What's he going to do with her?” asked the girl. “Has he told you?” she went on. “He can't be going to dip her in that water! I won't let him, we mustnt let him, if he tries anything like that.”

“Oh, he'll be sensible,” said John, “as far as that's concerned. He's got a head on his shoulders. Better leave him alone.”

It would have been easy to talk like this before Mr. Geard's face, even if the woman had not been groaning and twitching as she was, for he had a peculiar power of being at once there and not there, at the same time, under certain conditions.

“Careful!” he shouted out loudly now to the driver. “Don't go through the Square! Go by Bove Town, and down Silver, into Chilkwell.”

“Right ho, Sir! As your Worship wishes,” replied Mr. Lew. Mr. Geard was certainly at lhat moment deliberately engaged in breaking a good many natural laws, or at least refuting a good many conventional notions of such laws. With his great belly stuffed with Yorkshire pudding, with the weather around him. hot, moist, muggy and windless, with the sceptical John watching him with the scrutiny of a detached lynx, with the clocks striking that time of day, of all others the most material and when human souls are most drowsy and uninspired, with Crummie full of that particular kind of tender, practical, feminine solicitude, which is of all things most antipathetic to the drastic urge of creative energy, with the subject of his proposed cure so distraught with pain as to be almost out of her mind, it might indeed have seemed that he could not have been more handicapped in his amazing project, unless perhaps if Dr. Fell, still vehemently and professionally in opposition, had accompanied them.

Conditions were worse for their purpose when they finally arrived at the spot, than even John or Crummie had anticipated; for they found the place occupied by a gang of callous working-men fcpm the slums of Paradise, still lingering, though their dinner-hour had been over a long time, at their jests and boisterous fooling.

Solly Lew stopped his taxi just opposite these men and John, opening the door, gave Crummie his hand. His consciousness of the moment—of the accumulation of impressions that made up what the moment brought—had never been more alive. He was surprised—and ashamed too, so that the blood rushed to his face —when he found that the grasp of Crummie's warm, electric fingers had given him a disturbing pleasure. “She's a plump young baggage,” he said to himself, in order to destroy this feeling. “Her legs aren't like a boy's, as Mary's are!” But the truth was—although he hated to acknowledge it—that his sensual happiness with Mary had made him much less impervious to feminine charm than he had ever been in his life. “There's no depending on my wicked feelings,” he said to himself. “I seem to be just exactly what that Austrian says all babies are—polymorphous perverts!”

John had had nothing for lunch himself except a cup of tea and two mouthfuls of a bath-bun; so that although it was only thirty-five minutes past two, his nerves were as alert as if it had been four or even five o'clock. He had had his breakfast early too, so that he felt like a priest who had fasted in preparation for some especial function.

While Solly Lew was helping Mr. Geard get Tittie out of the car John glanced through the great torn gap in the hedge to where the workmen were engaged. They were beginning to work again now, with many suppressed glances and whispers and nudges directed towards the Mayor.

Behind where they were working at this moment, digging a ditch for further foundations, there already might be seen several quite substantial rows of walls—the beginning of Mr. GeardV Byzantine rotunda and Saxon arch. These walls, now risen to nearly seven feet high, totally concealed from where the men were working all sight of Chalice Well: for the Mayor's London architect, an expert, it turned out, in the mystical intention of compass-points, had got the entrance arch facing due east, so that vistors to the Well, following in the footsteps of the great Joseph—Agathos-Dikaios, as St. John calls him,—might approach its waters, moving, if they were religious, on their knees, and tapping the ground with their foreheads, in a westerly direction.

“Come!” said Mr. Geard now, in a hus.ky, authoritative voice, addressing his daughter and John.

Helped by Solly Lew he half-carried the suffering woman, still keeping up, heedless of where she was, her hysterical dialogue with her tormentor, over the littered hedge-gap and straight among the workmen.

Most of the men touched their caps, some went on working, all glanced at the Mayor of Glastonbury with that mingled familiarity and respect which he always aroused in the populace. He had come so often to watch them work, and had brought with him so many curious companions, that none of them seemed particularly astonished at the sight of Tittie's contorted figure.

He directed Solly to prop Mrs. Petherton up for a minute against an overturned wheelbarrow; and then drew the man aside, beckoning John and Crummie to join them.

“What I want you three,” he said emphatically, but speaking in a quite unexcited, natural voice, “to do for me now, if you will, is to stand in line between here and the Well, and not let a soul go up there! No one will probably want to. But if anyone does try they must be stopped. That's all! If I want you, Crummie, I'll shout. But I probably shan't want anyone. I won't be long. Bless us and keep us!”

Without any further words he moved over to the prostrate woman and lifted her up in his arms, holding her pressed against his chest.

“He be going to christen she, looks so!” said Solly Lew. “Well, Missy, I reckon us had best do what 'a said; hut it's sore in me heart to wish poor Bet were wi' I! Thik poor 'ooman would give the eyes out of she's head to see these grand doings!”

John was the only one of Mr. Geard's three singular disciples who had the gall to cast a furtive glance over his shoulder to watch the Mayor's sturdy, cautious steps, as he carried his distracted burden out of sight behind the newly erected masonry. When the twain had vanished from view, however, he also turned round and took up his sentinel's post. Thus John was standing., on the extreme west, Solly on the extreme east, and Crummie in a position that might be called east by south. Here they all three settled themselves to wait, as calmly as they could under the circumstances.

It was remarkable how little notice the labouring men, preoccupied with their digging, and anxious to show the Mayor's daughter that they were earning their pay, took of their employer's proceedings. John himself, as he watched the motions of their mattocks and spades, felt a queer trance-like feeling steal over his restless mind. His gaze, travelling over the stooping backs of the men on the level ground and over the heads and swinging picks of those working in the ditches, noted, in this curious dreamlike numbness of his senses—so alert a few minutes ago—that a flock of sheep was being driven up the road. These woolly creatures packed close together, but raising in the damp windless air no cloud of 'dust and much less than usual of their accustomed bleating, were moving en masse, like a river of grey, curly wool, eastward, away from the town.