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So it was against a background of roadside hedges and garden Dushes, stripping themselves, or being stripped, by wind and rain of their perilous-smelling, morbid umbrageousness that these two singular persons went through the experience of being initiated into each other's withheld identity.

Nowhere in all the fertile and leafy regions of Somerset, so heavy in vegetation, does Winter set in with more definite emphasis than in the regions around Glastonbury. The thicker the foliage, the richer the earth odours, the bluer the apple-scented vapours, the more stark and desolate is the contrast. Then begins a wet, chilly, lamentable nakedness; and the three Glastonbury hills weep together like three titanic mourners over Arthur and Merlin and Lancelot and Gwenevere.

Mr. Evans felt that to the end of his days he would be compelled to associate the approach of Winter with the intense nervous reactions through which he was passing in this first intimacy he had ever had with a woman. All through November, as the man went to and fro from his small house in Wells Old Road, a street that lay northwest of Bove Town, to his shop in the High Street, the gradual unleafing of so many twigs and stalks and branches and trunks coincided with his closer and closer intimacy with Cordelia.

To his surprise he found himself completely spared those shocks of physical disgust and sick aversion which he had been expecting and which indeed—in his fantastic self-punishment— he had assumed as the essence of this new adventure. The situation was indeed a very curious one; for until the time of his living with Cordelia every vestige of sensuality in his nature had been absorbed in his weird and monstrous vice.

Now there occurred a reversion of this; and his sadistic tendency fell into the background for a period. It did not leave him. His owrn belief that it could, by some contact with the miraculous element in Glastonbury, be compelled to leave him still remained; but the moment for that had not yet come. His ghastly and nearly tragic experience at the Midsummer Pageant had not. and he never pretended to himself that it had, worked that healing spell. But it slowly began to present itself to his mind as a strange and unexpected phenomenon, that in his new relations with Cordelia there arose in the essential nature of the case, a situation that lent itself to what might be called a harmless and legitimate sadism, a sadism that was so mitigated and diffused that it was difficult to disassociate it from a delicate and tender attraction.

It was a growing astonishment to Mr. Evans to discover what a world of exquisite and thrilling possibilities the mere difference between the sexes creates. It was a surprise to him to find out what subtleties of receptivity exist in the nerves of a girl who is in love for the first time in her life!

And just here the presence of his suppressed perversion stood him in good stead; for it annihilated totally any possibility of that crude and unimaginative craving for novelty which had led Tom Barter such a dance.

Accustomed, just as was his friend John Crow, to derive his wickedest thrills from his imagination, Mr. Evans found that this strange, dim undersea of feminine self-consciousness, whose ebbings and Sowings now receded and advanced around him, was a world so full of dark unexpected storms and of mysterious halcyon calms, caused apparently by a word, a look, a gesture, that in association with it, it was impossible to suffer from that withering ennui and horrible life-weariness which hitherto had been—to take a leaf out of Tom Chinnock's book—the particular Terre Gastee of his destiny. The trend of his mind too—as imaginative in his “unpardonable sin” as it was in his antiquarian fantasies—did both him and Cordelia the unspeakably good turn, of rendering what is usually known as beauty in a woman totally unimportant.

Nature was in a position to supply the place of beauty by her basic insistence upon the fact that this awkward and unbe-guiling creature was, after all, endowed with both the form and the susceptibilities of a normal feminine being.

The wise irony of those tutelary spirits which do not desert in our need even the worst of us, destined Mr. Evans to find his Glastonbury miracle where he least looked for it; for the presence of the Grail in that spot has the effect of digging deep channels for the amorous life of those who touch its soil.

All lovers who have ever visited the place will know at once what is meant by this. None approach these three Glastonbury hills without an intensification of whatever erotic excitement they are capable of and whatever deepening of the grooves of their sublimated desire falls within the scope of their fate.

Cordelia was a true daughter of Glastonbury; and the magic of the place, as Mr. Evans in his first manner was always explaining, had the power of acting as an aphrodisiac of far more potent force than the famous “sea-holly” of Chesil Beach.

The Grail of Glastonbury—and this is why Mr. Geard was entirely justified in making it the centre of his new religious cult—just because of its timeless association with the First Cause had the peculiarity of exciting human souls to concentrate their eroticism upon one single ideal object, as Sam for instance had done in becoming a mediaeval lover of his tortured God-Man; while it excited others, among whom was John Crow, to concentrate upon one real human being.

As for Cordelia, she had been living, all that windy November, in a state of such wild and wanton excitement that it is doubtful if there was any woman in Somersetshire through the whole Autumn, as drunken as she was with the lavish ichor of Eros.

Mr. Evans was so ignorant of the ways of women and so confused by his new experience that he did not realise the emotional extremity which his caresses were stirring up in Cordelia, nor the frantic tumultuousness of the feelings which his love-making aroused. The girl was passion-drunk. She never missed taking Mr. Evans to the shop. She never missed calling for him at the shop.

On all possible occasions when he had a day off. or when the shops were officially closed, she would make him take her for long walks in every direction: but principally to the east which meant beginning with Chalice Hill.

On these walks she would cling to his arm and pour into his ear abrupt, excited, and very often hardly coherent rhapsodies. Love in general was the subject of these spasmodic outbursts, rather than any elaborations of her own feeling; nor was Mr. Evans one to miss their poetic quality. Her words flowed and tossed; and then wavered and sank. They drifted and wilted, only to rise up again, mounting, gathering, rushing forward, to a new climax, to be followed in its turn by a new sinking down to exhausted silence.

One particular walk Mr. Evans never forgot. It was when they were following a little field-track between Havyatt Gap and West Pennard that the girl's eloquence mounted to the climax which so especially impressed him. It wTas a wild, gusty, rainy day; though the rain was discontinuous and the gusts intermittent; but when it neither rained nor blew there fell upon that stripped landscape a cold paralysed interim of shivering stillness, in the midst of which Mr. Evans felt that he could hear the beat of the wings of the Birds of Rhiannon.

On this particular walk to Pennard, Mr. Evans realised that there were moments when his strange companion gathered up into her uncomely face a spiritual grandeur that was astonishing. Cordelia's face lent itself to windy and rainy weather. She had been herself a little shocked, as well as startled by the manner in which, in that twilight escape by herself, seven months before, to the Two Oaks, she had been obsessed by a feeling of dominating power.

It was about four o'clock on this early-darkening December day when their field-path—a very small unfrequented cattle-drove on the way to West Pennard—led them past a solitary Scotch fir. The rough, reddish-brown trunk of this great tree was soaked with rain on its western side; and showers of raindrops fell on their heads from a big branch above them which stretched towards the west like a gigantic extended arm.

Cordelia wore an old cloth cap of Mr. Evans?; and he himself had come out bare-headed, fearful of not being able to keep on his head3 that gusty afternoon, his familiar bowler hat.

Thus as they paused beneath the tree whose upper branches groaned and creaked to greet them, the man found he could kiss the wet cheeks and cold mouth of his woman without the teasing interruption of either of their hats being knocked off, a thing that was always happening with these two clumsy ones.

“I never knew what it was like to kiss,” said Mr. Evans, “before I had you! I like kissing you at the end of a dark day and under this Scotch fir.”

Their wet cold faces, her shapeless nose and his grotesque hooked nose like the caricature-mask of a Roman soldier, their large, contorted, abnormal mouths, made, it might seem, more for anguished curses against God than for the sweet usage of lovers, were now pressed savagely against each other and, as they kissed, queer sounds came from both their throats, that were answered by the groanings of the tree and by the raindrops as the wind shook it

A series of long-drawn cawings reached them now, as four black rooks with a faint grinding and grating of their huge wings passed over the tree, aiming for the rookery above Mark Moor Court

Down somewhere in the southern hedge of the field where this Scotch fir grew, an old holly tree was creaking lamentably in the wind. Uninitiated travellers in that lonely spot would have casually remarked: “What's that creaking over there in that hedge?”—but each of these two ugly skulls with the anguished distinction of the ancient house of Rhys upon their lineaments thought within themselves: “How lucky I am to be happy when God delights to make even trees suffer!”

As a matter of fact, although neither of these human lovers were aware of this, between that Scotch fir and that ancient holly there had existed for a hundred years a strange attraction. Night by night, since the days when the author of Faust lay dying in Weimar and those two embryo trees were in danger of being eaten by grubs, they had loved each other. The magnetic disturbance of the atmosphere at that spot, while the distorted mouth of Mr. Evans was pressed against the distorted mouth of Cordelia, was an agitation to the old tree in the hedge, so that in its creaking there arose that plaintive yearning of the vegetable world which comes to us more starkly in the winter than in the summer.

In the summer when the wind stirs the trees, there is that rushing, swelling sound of masses of heavy foliage, a sound that drowns, in its full-bosomed, undulating, ocean-like murmur, the individual sorrows of trees. But across this leafless unfrequented field these two evergreens could lift to each other their subhuman voices and cry their ancient vegetation-cry, clear and strong; that cry which always seems to come from some underworld of Being, where tragedy is mitigated by a strange undying acceptance beyond the comprehension of the troubled hearts of men and women.

It is on such gusty, early December afternoons, when darkness falls before people prepare for tea, that the symbolic essence of rain is most deeply felt. And that they should be realised in their essential quiddity, these whirling gusts of grey rain tossed obliquely across the darkening hills, they must not come in a steady, tropic downpour. Floods of rain destroy the quality and die significance of rain. Drops they must be, many, many drops; an infinity of drops if you will; but still numberless separate drops, grey or brown or whitish-grey, in order that they may retain that rain-smell, rain-taste, rain-secret, which separates rain from ordinary water.

They were both silent for a space after this embrace, standing under the Scotch fir, and Mr. Evans thought to himself that the look he now caught upon her profile was one of the strangest and most arresting he had ever seen on a human face. And it was no wonder he felt like this; for her face had caught that mysterious secret of the rain which very few faces and very few imaginations are able to catch. But Cordelia's face had caught it today, and held it there now in all its wild far-hori-zoned meanings.

There are faces made for moonlight. There are faces created to respond to the wind. There are faces for sandy deserts, for lonely seashores, for solitary headlands, for misty dawns, for frosty midnights. Cordelia's face was made for rain. It had nothing in it that was normally beautiful; and yet it became at this moment the living incarnation of all those long hours when rain had mingled with her secretest hopes. Her face was charged with the rain that had streamed down the window-panes at Cardiff Villa, twilight after twilight, while her thoughts had been flying far away; far over dripping forests, far over swollen rivers to green-black castle walls of which she fancied herself the mistress or the captive.

The path they were following now approached a steep incline which led between bare muddy banks and along deeply indented cart-ruts to a small clump of spruce firs at the top of a considerably high hill. They were both familiar with this hill and with this clump of spruce firs. There was indeed for Mr. Evans a special interest in this place, which was some distance out of Glastonbury. He had himself found a deserted sheepfold up there, in a clearing in the centre of this little fir wood, a rough building made entirely of ancient blocks of mossy stone, but quite roofless and windowless.

Pottering about evening after evening, in the environs of Glastonbury, Mr. Evans and Cordelia had made more than one interesting find; but with regard to these old stones, that had been thrown so crudely together here to form a shelter for sheep, our Welshman had a theory that made them the most interesting of all his discoveries. He held very strongly to the opinion— and he had even persuaded Mr. Merry to come round to his view—that these stones originally belonged to the little chantry or hermitage to which Launcelot du Lac retired to die, after the vanishing of Arthur and after Gwenevere's retreat to the nunnery at Amesbury.

It was a long tedious ascent up to this little fir clump; nor had the place any striking aspect or any particular beauty save this ruined sheepfold in the centre of it. And yet as they struggled up the bare slope in the rain, Mr. Evans remarked to his bride: