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All was darkness. Faintly between the dark undrawn curtains he could see the dim shapes of the trees outside, outlined against a few pale stars. Empty was the great four-posted bed of the Prince of Orange; cold and desolate in the deserted room.

“Nell, little Nell!” His voice came back to him like the voice of someone who speaks in a place of the dead. With the first sickening catch of his heart he thought to himself: “She's taken him down to supper with Father!” Leaving the door of the big empty room wide open, he rushed out upon the landing and ran down the stairs. He opened the dining-room door. Pallid in the darkness shone the white tablecloth, laid for their evening meal. It made him think of a cloth upon an altar when they have put out the candles.

Instinctively delaying—because of something ice-cold gathering about his heart—his plunge into the museum, he opened the drawing-room door. Doors, doors, doors, always doors—and only emptiness within! With the musty smell of the fireless drawing-room—that room where he had held Nell to his heart on the morning he'd decided to go away—there smote upon his strung-up consciousness a sharp quick death-odour, the sense of the dying woman's body from which Dr. Fell had torn him into this bitter life, twenty-six years ago!

Well! He must make the plunge. Hearing still tne voices of Penny and the gardener from the rear of the house and the noise of chairs being pushed violently about—“Tihey're both drunk,” he thought—he opened the museum door and went in. The lamp was untrimmed and smoking. The place seemed foul with lamp-soot; but this room at any rate was not empty! In his accustomed wicker chair sat his father. But to the son's surprise, for Sam had never known him do such a thing before, Mat Dekker had pulled his chair close up to the fire; and he was in the act, apparently, of making the brightest blaze he could; for his big hands were fumbling at the grate, and the flames were rising high from the wood he had been piling on, and it looked as if, now that his great solar enemy had done his worst to him, he were making a lonely, sullen, Promethean gesture in defiance of all these cruel gods.

Sam closed the door behind him For the first time in his life he did not give even a glance at the aquarium. “What is it, Father? Where is she? What has happened?” But even while he was asking these questions his heart knew perfectly well; for he remembered what Angela had told him and he recalled that letter with the foreign stamp.

Mat Dekker raised his head from the flames which were throwing all the indents and wrinkles and corrugations of his ruddy face into startling prominence. He spoke no word however. All he did was to make a gesture with his hand towards the table.

Sam went to the table and turned down the smoking lamp. There, between the lamp and the aquarium, lay a folded scrap of paper, with “For Sam” written on it in pencil. He read it, standing by the lamp, while his father went on selecting the most inflammable bits of wood from the wood-bos, at each increase in the heat of the blaze giving his chair a jerk still nearer. The pencilled scrawl was of some length, but it was evidently traced in a great hurry. Nell's hand, however, was so schoolgirlish that Sam had no difficulty in making out the words:

Sam, my darling Sam, I shall always love you best bf all. Whatever happens to me, whatever anyone says or does, you'll always be my one Great Love. But he came and made me go back with him. She's been gone a long time—gone to Russia, he says. He doesn't like her any more. Will and I spoke freely of every, thing before I would let him take me away. He says he always knew the child was yours, but he says he loves it for my sake and always will. This is true, Sam; and I think baby loves Mm more than either his father or mother! Will has no anger against you and I've forgiven him about her. Oh, Sam, never, never, never will I forget you. Later [she had crossed out the word “later” and written “soon”] we must see each other ^again. We've got used to seeing each other in your way, haven't we? But Will was so unhappy, Sam. He said he'd go to Africa if I didn't come back. I was sad and your father was making^ himself miserable about us; so I know it's the best thing. You'll come back now, Sam, won't you, now that I'm gone, and live with him again? My arms are tight round my Sam's neck and always will be.

Your Nell. P.S. I hadn't time to tidy up my room. Oh, Sam I can't help it. But I love you, I love you!

He folded the letter up and stood motionless for a while, staring at the aquarium, but seeing nothing except Nell's face. Then lie moved across to his father and laid his hand on his shoulder.

The older man turned round fiercely upon him, and Sam never forgot the gleam of anger—blind, bewildered, tragic anger—in his deep-set grey eyes. “Go!” he cried hoarsely. “Get out of here! Go back to your clay-hauling. When I want your pity, I'll send for you!” It was clear that the man's whole mind was completely obsessed at present by his own frustrated passion. His emotions had smouldered and smouldered till they had become like a lump of darkly burning peat, self-scorched, self-fed, self-consumed.

Sam sighed heavily and went to the door. He still held Nell's letter tightly crumpled up in his hand. “Don't set the chimney on fire, Father!” he called back as he went out. He walked down the long dark passage and went into the kitchen. Here there were many signs of some recent riotous scene but the two old cronies were at peace again, facing each other by the stove, each with a bowl of the famous “gorlas” on their knees. They were too fuddled to rise from their chairs at Sam's entrance.

“Why, Penny,” he said, “I thought you never drank with Mr. Weatherwax.”

“Her baint drinking wi' I. Her be hearing I zing me zongs,” and the enormous countenance of the gardener, radiant with tipsy contentment, burst into his favorite ditty:

“The Miller, the Malster, the Devil and I Had a heifer, had a filly, had a Ding-Dong, But now in a grassy green glade she do lie. Pass along, boys! Pass along!”

But Penny Pitches looked dreamily from one to the other. “Best for 'un to zing,” she muttered brokenly. “Let 'un zing, Master Sam, let us all zing and ding! I'd 'a never drunk wi' he if thik bare-faced baggage hadn't called I names to me veace when I gave she a piece o* me mind. Yes. you may work your chin at me as much as thee likes, me lad! Her've gone back where her hasn't to sleep single no more. They baggages be all the seame! Master Zoyland had only to ring bell and call 'Nell,” and up she picks her baby, and pop goes the weasel! 1 did me best for to hold she for 'ee, Mr. Sam; but her only called 1 names, and Master Zoyland curst I for a wold bitch."

Seeing that there was nothing better than this to be got tonight out of his foster-mother; and too sick at the heart to be able to endure another stave of “Ding-Dong,” Sam wearily went on his way. Slowly, very slowly, as he returned through the crowded Sunday-night streets to Manor House Road, past the calm, familiar tower of St. John's, the influence of his Vision came back a little; and he had regained enough acquiescence in the decree of destiny by the time he reached his top floor, to receive a certain homely comfort from the wild extravagant pleasure with which the black spaniel, emerging from beneath his bed, leaped up to lick his hands.

His conscious mind was sad, even to the verge of a sort of inert despair, from this loss of Nell at the very moment when he was ready to live with her; but, below his conscious mind, stirring still in the depths of his being, was the feeling: “I can endure whatever fate can do to me, for I have seen the Grail!”

THE IRON BAR

It was now the end of February. The newspapers all over England had contained startling headlines for the last week about the Glastonbury commune, most of them calling upon the government to put a stop—by some drastic action—to this scandalous interference with the rights of private property. Nothing, however, was done except what was done by Philip Crow to protect the building of his new cement road leading down from Wookey Hole and his new steel bridge over the Brue on the south side of Lake Village Field; and Philip's action was confined to the introduction of police protection.

There had been so many disputes that year all over the country between town councils and local land-owners that it was difficult for Philip to make the authorities realise that this sudden transforming of Glastonbury into one single co-operative polity was anything more than what the chief of the Taunton police called “another of them sky-larking council tricks.”

The government probably would have interfered all the same —for unemployment in all the big neighbouring towns, such as Bristol and Cardiff, was acute just then, and there was a dangerous restlessness throughout the country—if it had not been that the really important fortress of private property, namely the Glastonbury bank, remained untouched by this socialistic experiment.

On the twenty-third of February Mr. Evans came down to his shop in the High Street, in exceptional good spirits. The day was one of unusually delicate atmospheric effects. Grey upon grey abounded, with occasional fragments of what looked almost like mother-of-pearl as the ditch-mists were blown here and there over walled courts and mossy lawns while the sun struggled with the clouds.

“I have got an exciting bit of news for you when you come back, Owen,” Cordelia had said to him at the door of their little house as he set off, “but I'll keep il for tea! Only be sure and don't be later than five, will you?”

“No, no, I'll be back by five, si fractus inlabatur orbisl I'll be back, Cordy, I swear it,” he had replied.

As he hurried down the long, sloping road, Hanked by workmen's houses, the black tails of his tight-waisted overcoat flapping like the feathers of an excited jackdaw heading against the wind, he wondered to himself what Cordy's news was. “Something to do with her father,” he thought to himself, “Perhaps he's found he's richer than he supposed, after counting up his expenses.” When he got to the town he met Finn Toller slouching into Dickery Cantle^s tavern. Several encounters of late had Mr. Evans had with Codfin since a certain momentous meeting, a few days after the sheepfold incident, when he had actually challenged the man about his singular encounter with Mad Bet.

Codfin from the start had detected with that extraordinary clairvoyance which imbeciles share with children, that Mr. Evans had a morbid interest in physical violence; not even excluding murder. He felt too that he was absolutely free from any danger that the “curiosity man”—as he called him to his colleagues— would ever b3tray him to the authorities. “He be a funny one, his wone self,” he would say to his friends in the tap-room at Can-tie's where all the poorest and shabbiest of Glastonbury's derelicts were wont to gather.

“I . . . be . . . going ... to do it . . . tonight . . . Mister,” Codfin whispered to him now, with his hand on the tavern door-handle. The blinds of the place were down. By the lawT of England it was closed. By the connivance of the Mayor of Glas-tonbury people could enter and be served all the morning from the best cellar in Wessex.

“I can't hear you, man. I'm deaf this morning, deaf as an iron bar,” said Mr. Evans, giving him a look like that of a malevolent executioner. "If you do anything—anything really, you know, I'll come and stop it! You understand that I suppose? I'll come, wherever you are, for I can always find you, and put a stop to it/9

He spoke in a threatening tone and laid his hand with a vicious grip upon Finn Toller's left arm just above the elbow. Codfin, whose right hand was still on the handle of the tap-room, showed not the slightest sign of nervousness.

“Tonight will be the time, Mister, then,” he said slowly, “for thee to come and put a stop to it; and I'll be here all morning 'sknow, if thee wants to come and hear where thee'd best come to stop it; and maybe hear too when thee'd best come to stop it. There's nothink like being in the know, pard; for then a fellow can please his own self. If so be as thee does drop in ere the mornin's over, maybe thee'll have a sip of beer wi' I, to christen this pretty day, 'sknow? afore thee comes up hill to see what must be stopped.”

The man's straw-coloured beard wagged as he spoke and his pale eyes swam with an unholy amusement. Every word he uttered seemed to carry a double meaning, seemed loaded with hints that his leering eyes completed and confirmed. His weak subhuman intelligence seemed to wriggle into the interstices of Mr. Evans' wickedest and secretest thoughts and snuggle and nuzzle and nestle there, as if Mr. Evans' thoughts were the nipples of the many-breasted Diana of the Ephesians.

This encounter between the two men was indeed the culmination of several furtive meetings, in all of which there had been, below the surface of what audibly passed between them, a wordless conspiracy of understanding, mounting higher and higher; just as if their under-consciousness—the worm-snakes within them —had learned the art of an obscene intertwining. Codfin had quickly discovered that his own homicidal instinct, in which the mental image of the iron bar played so lively a part, was responded to by something darker and far more evil, as it was far less simple, in Mr. Evans' nature.

Once he had touched the fringe of this dark knowledge, the tramp was led on—for all his imbecility—to play most subtly upon this obscure chord, recognising that the accident of the sheepfold had helped him to acquire a definite power over this queer “curiosity gent” who took such an interest in talking to him. A potential murderer, going about among supposedly normal people, acts as a perambulating magnet, drawing to himself a cloud of curious tokens; such an one's recklessness in regard to the upshot—the police, the jail, the judge, the gibbet—endows him with the same sort of power over less desperate minds that an Alpine guide, immune to dizziness, acquires over the would-be summit climbers whose faltering steps he supports with his rope.

Codfin had already tasted—in his crafty imbecile manner— this sharp, delicious arctic breath of unexpected power, in his talk with Red Robinson in Mrs. Chinnockfs parlor. Robinson, however, had escaped him completely; thereby indicating thai emotional 'ate as an urge to crime, cannot compete with the worm-snake of the sexual nerve.

“Well! I've got to get on now,” said Mr. Evans. "Good-day to 'ee, Toller! We mustn't carry our joking too far.'*'