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Mr. Evans became aware that old Mrs. RoLiiison. who had been waiting for Sam's late appearance bc-iorc g:»ing home, had now crept up with her broom and duster 1:11 she v,as within hearing. The ex-servant of the Bishop must have caughl some word of their discourse—one of those tragic clue-words of oar human Tournament such as old women rejoice to lap up, as cats lap milk—and she probably thought of this scene at the Arimathe-an“s tomb as a sort of moving-picture close-up, which, if she could get a good seat, ” 'ud be the sime as the theayter."

“I can't help thinking, Mr. Dekker/' said the Welshman now. ”that your ideas have changed a good deal since you talked to us that spring day on the Tor. It seems to me that then your ideas were more orthodox. I seem to remember your quoting the words of the Mass, Verburn caro factum est, but from what you say now-------"

“Yes, yes, yes,—I have changed, Mr. Evans, and everything about me's changed; and the whole world has changed! The world can't go on devouring itself, as it's doing now% snatching, biting, stinging, poisoning, ravishing its flesh, and pressing itself with its beautiful breasts”—he threw a very queer expression into these last words, the reason of which was obscure to his chief hearer, but from the way her little rat's eyes glittered in the dusky aisle, not so obscure to Mrs. Robinson!—“against reality!”

Mr. Evans found it very difficult to look at this agitated figure on the other side of the tomb of the great tomb-lender without a stir in the coils of the nerve-snake within him that fed upon such food.

“You are lucky in one thing, Mr. Dekker,” he said. “I mean in your quiet life at the Vicarage with your father.”

“I'm afraid Elphin's feelings were hurt,” said Sam, looking up and turning his head towards the door.

His eyes fell upon Mrs. Robinson who was dusting the seat of a perfectly spotless oaken pew and edging nearer and nearer.

“Hullo, Mrs. Robinson!” he, called out; and his mouth worked convulsively before he could say another word in the irritation of her presence and his desire to get rid of her.

“Will yer be wantin' me henny more, Mister?” the old woman responded. “Because, if not, I'll be miking me way 'ome.”

“Nothing, nothing, thank you!” he replied, impatiently and added in the same tone, “You can go now, Mrs. Robinson.”

(“ 'Twas a shime to 'ear the way they two were talking,” the old lady said to her son when she got home that night. “Ondecent 'eathen talk 'twere such as never ought to be 'eard hinside of a 'orspital, least still of a church. Mr. Sammy, 'ee 'urried me hout of door as if I'd catch a palsy by stighin' a minute in their company!”)

“Boys are very sensitive creatures, Dekker,” announced Mr. Evans sententiously. “When I was young there was an old man in the Pembrokeshire hills, where we lived, that I used to watch milking his goats. I used to catch them for him sometimes. He used to get angry with them and I used to be glad when he got angry with them. But one day he sent me away for throwing stones at them. And—do you know, Dekker, I wouldn't go home! I stayed out on the hills for a whole summer's night. I slept in a gully on a heap of heather, and all that night when I thought of the goats------” He stopped abruptly; for he saw that Sam was no longer listening. Sam indeed had only heard a small portion of this speech and that portion not very distinctly. He was keeping his eyes fixed on the retreating form of old Mrs. Robinson; but the eyes of his heart were fixed upon Nell Zoyland.

The girl was back again now from the hospital, and established—with Mrs. Pippard as a nurse for the child—once more at Whitelake Cottage.

Mr. Evans had done more than blush as he told about the goats. A deep swarthiness had actually mounted to his cheeks, his forehead, his neck. For this story was a sacred story. Led on by the hour and by the place he had told one of the important stories of his youth.

But Sam Dekker wasn't interested enough even to know whether he had been speaking of goats or of rabbits or sheep. Mr, Evans' black-coated figure had begun to grow misty and faint for Sam; and Mrs. Robinson, issuing forth from the church door, had become for Sam like some fantastical curlicue on the lettering of a tragic volume. Even a saint cannot bear up always; and at that moment, so great was his physical exhaustion that something in him nearly broke down.

Mr. Evans little knew how near this student of the Fourth Gospel, standing over the tomb of the man who had buried Jesus, had come to crying out a wild curse upon the divine Lover.

“She's my girl! She's my girl!” Sam moaned in his heart. “What hast Thou given me; what canst Thou ever give me, in exchange for my girl?”

When they were all at last out of the church and got home— Sam asleep; Mr, Evans asleep; Mrs. Robinson asleep; but Elphin Cantle still sitting at the window of his stucco tower—there ensued a singular dialogue without words between the red light of the Reserved Sacrament and the empty sarcophagus of St. Joseph. This was one of those dialogues which it is never fantastical to interpret in human language, because no one can deny that in some language they must be perpetually occurring.

“Aren't you tired, red light, of shining so long without a pause in front of this Miracle of the faith?”

Thus, in a cold, flat, toneless voice, enquired the empty Sarcophagus.

“Yes,” answered the red light, “I am very tired.”

“If you could get anyone to move you,” said the Sarcophagus, “you could rest here, within me; for / am tired of being empty!”

And the echo of the clock in St. John's Tower, coming down through the belfry into the church, repeated in a voice faint as an old man's last whisper:

“Tired . . . tired . . . tired . . . tired • . . tired . . . tired . . . tired . . . tired . . . tired * . . tired . . .” as it echoed the striking of the hour of ten over the roofs of Glastonbury,

Tossie Stickles' lusty twin girls were christened by the Vicar of Glastonbury—bastards though they were!—with all due ceremony and at the regular hour for that ritual, after the children's service, on the day following the Evans' visit to the ruined sheepfold. Immediately after this ceremony the young mother and her small daughters were established once again under Miss Elizabeth's roof in Benedict Street. Nancy Stickles still continued to come each day “to help out”; so that Toss was enabled to divide her time between looking after her infants and cooking for the family, which stiS included—after several battles royal with my Lord's sister in Bath—the independent Lady Rachel, who now went regularly to work with Ned Athling in the little office of the weekly Wayfarer.

Deep in Miss Elizabeth's heart was lodged the fixed idea that eventually Mr. Barter would marry Tossie; and with a view to this natural and ethical contingency, she now had begun encouraging the manager of the municipal factory to pay constant visits to his illegitimate family under her roof, going so far as even to give up her drawing-room, whenever that gentleman came, to his conversations with Tossie.

It was one of those fantastic and incredible arrangements that in real life are always occurring; situations which, in premonition, seem absurdly impossible, but which are the very ones that Nature, moulding the prejudices of men to her own views, takes a humorous pleasure in bringing about.

The christening of Nell Zoyland's child was something much less easily dealt with; just as the fate of its mother was in the hands of more eccentric and wayward persons than either Tom Barter or Miss Crow. Will Zoyland had made up his mind that his father, the Marquis, should stand godfather to the little boy, who was to be called Henry after the great man. But the Marquis had a nervous dislike of appearing in public in Glastonbury— a place which he had come heartily to distrust and dislike since he had been mobbed by the rabble on that eventful Pageant-day —and so after long discussions and procrastinations it had been worked out that Nell's child was lo be baptised at Whitelake Cottage by Mat Dekker on the fifteenth of December.

Hearing that Lord P. was coming for this occasion, as well as Dave and Persephone who were the little Harry's other godparents, what must the good Mrs. Pippard do—who was related to half Glastonbury—but beg from her mistress the privilege of giving a little christening party of her own to celebrate this auspicious day. Thus the fifteenth of December that year was to be a lively occasion out at Whitelake; and it was a fortunate occurrence, and a good omen too, for babe Harry, that this day, after so much rain, was one of cloudy and intermittent but still of quite perceptible sunshine. Harry was a tragic little boy in certain ways. He clung desperately to his motherland it was always touching to see the struggle in his small heart between his intense greediness and his hatred of being fed by any other “Mwys,” as Mr. Evans would have called it, than his mother's lovely breasts.

The proletarian contingent of Master Henry's party was to include Mother Legge and her now quite convalescent niece, Tittie Petherton, Nancy Stickles, who was also a relative, Sally Jones who had once been in service along with Doxy Pippard, the old woman's daughter, and last, but not least, our old acquaintance Mr. Abel Twig, who was Mrs. Pippard's cousin.

All these persons were to have their tea in Nell's kitchen, while Lord P., together with Mr. and Mrs. Spear and the Vicar, refreshed themselves in her small parlour.

The present dwellers of Whitelake Cottage included not only Mrs. Pippard herself, but her daughter, Eudoxia, a girl who was now acting as the Zoyland's housemaid. Both mother and daughter slept in the ante-room of Will's private retreat at the back of the cottage, while Nell and her child slept in the front bedroom.

Since the show season at Wookey had come to an end Will Zoyland had been employed by Philip in the much more important role of assistant-overseer of the new tin-mining works. The head overseer—an industrious and clever technician—was not good at keeping his subordinates up to the scratch; nor had he much initiative with regard to tracking out new veins of metal-deposit. Thus Zoyland's job at the tin mine was partly a disciplinary one and partly a geological one, neither of which occupations exactly suited his peculiar gifts. But he did not demand much salary; ten times less, in fact, than Philip would have had to give to anyone else; and all the labourers on the works held him in respect because of his name.

Lord P. had announced that he would drive over in his dogcart from Mark Moor Court, picking up Lady Rachel on his way through Glastonbury. The christening was roughly timed for between four and five; and Mat Dekker had told Nell that he would try to come over himself soon after three, so as to enjoy a little talk with her alone before her other guests arrived.

Will Zoyland had come to the secret conclusion, after first setting eyes on his wife's infant, that this was none of his; but he had concealed this certainty so successfully that Nell had not the least suspicion that he had divined the truth; and this secret knowledge of his gave him a great and unfair advantage in the daily struggle for the mastery between them; for he found that to have such a weapon, and not to use it, was the strongest weapon he could possibly have; and he took full advantage of this. His position, just then, was in many respects a singular and crucial one. The fact that Nell was suckling the child herself, though old Mrs. Pippard helped her washing and dressing him, made it psychologically difficult for Will to start making love to her again. He had a curious penchant for babies, amounting almost to a mania for these odd little poppets, whose angers are so nerve-racking and whose philosophical calm is so soothing; so that he won Nell's maternal gratitude willy-nilly by his tenderness to her offspring, especially as he consented to sleep on the couch in the parlour and to leave her and child the uninterrupted use of their bedroom. It had given Nell a queer kind of shock when she saw Mrs. Pippard making up that particular couch for the master of the house; that couch which had not been used as a bed by anyone since that day in March!

But Will's passionate devotion to the child disarmed her completely because it was more than she had dreamed would happen, and she took it to imply that he had not the least suspicion that the little Harry was not his.

The baby, on its side, seemed to take to Will with a degree of awareness and attraction unusual at that age. He was a child of colossal egoism and of an immense power of love. He loved Nell with a piquant zest that was delicious to behold; but his love for her was a hot, feverish, violent thing; while his response to Zoyland was a sort of rapturous calm. In his furious fits of temper, which were of a tragic intensity and prophetic of a future that made the girl tremble to think of, Zoyland alone could handle him, quell him, console him. Time and again, old Mrs. Pippard, who could do nothing with him, would say to Nell—“If it weren't for the measter, thik mommet ?ud fling 'isself into convoolsions.”

“He cant not think it his own child!” Nell would say to herself; but how he could have been so deceived, when its pathetic little chin was so exactly like Sam's, she never considered. She was very grateful, too, at being let off all love-making; and this she attributed to Will's passion for the child; and it made her uneasy, with a sort of shamefaced discomfort, to think that she owed her escape from his amorous advances to this deception. But in this matter, too, as much as over the child, the girl, for all her feminine insight, had been completely outwitted by the crafty huntsman. It was really the sly old Zookey Pippard who engineered this treachery. Perhaps, being a relative of Mother Legge, she had it in her blood to play procuress. But it was she who had persuaded her daughter to come up to Whitelake Cottage from a very good place at a farm near Witham Friary, and her arguments must have been very subtle ones; for the wench received, in return for her work, probably the lowest wage that has ever been paid to a maid, at any rate in a gentlefolk's house, from Westbury Beacon on the north to Huish Episcopi on the south. But Zookey was—as Mr. Weatherwax, who knew her “up hill and down dale” said to Penny, when those old gossips first “larn'd who 'twere were looking 'arter Missy Zoyland”—“the cunningest bitch-badger this side o' Tarnton.”