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“Joking?” thought the tramp as he went in. “That's just the way you would talk, my fine gent!” He sighed heavily as he shambled up to the bar counter behind which young Elphin was standing. “If you'd a-heard Mad Bet tell I last night what she'd do to I, if I didn't kill her beau quick, you wouldna' talk about joking!”

As soon as Mr. Evans turned the corner by the Cattle Market, he saw before him, about three hundred yards away, the familiar figure of Miss Elizabeth Crow, seated on a wooden bench just outside a seldom-used cattlepen.

Over the empty enclosures behind her, where the animals formerly were tethered, over the wooden posts and the asphalt paving, over bits of stray nondescript paper blown in there between the iron railings of the bench where she was sitting, the flickering misty sunlight fell with the same caressing benediction as it would have carried had it fallen upon the dancing waves of Weymouth Bay or upon the mossy stones of Mark Court.

Miss Crow was holding a closed umbrella in her hand, with the ferule of which she was scrawling vague meaningless marks in the trodden mud at her feet. She was pondering upon an interview she had had that morning, as soon as his clinic opened, with Dr. Fell, and wondering why it was that doctors never come right out with what they know of their patient's case. “Why didn't he say in plain words/' she thought, ” 'your heart is dangerously affected? Those symptoms you have are an indelible sign that you might go off at any moment. The best thing you can do will be to go to bed as soon as you get home and stay there.'“ She had indeed known herself for the last three months that her heart was getting worse and this morning's interview though Fell had been so cautious, was the convincing blow. She had read the good man's conclusions, shrewd old woman as she was, like a book; and if he had said to her, ”You've only three weeks more to live," she could not have received her sentence more definitely than she did from his evasive humming and hawing.

The chief effect upon Elizabeth's mind was to render her enjoyment of the air and the wind of this day more vivid and intense than she could have believed possible. It was as if this verdict condemning her to death had taken away a thin screen between herself and life.

There was a little leafless poplar tree not far from her bench with the bark rubbed off its northern side, the side facing the cattlepens and some dried dogs' excrement fouling its roots on the side facing the street. In the bare branches of this tree chat-1 tered and wrangled half a dozen sparrows and upon its trunk, out of reach of cattle or dogs, some tall wastrel had cut with a knife the initials of himself and his girl.

The way the broken misty light fell upon this little tree gave it that special quality of magic that familiar objects often receive, whether there is any human eye to see it or not, under certain effects of the atmosphere.

Elizabeth Crow's feelings were ebbing and flowing just then between a faint, cold, shuddering recoil from the shock of death —it was when she felt this recoil that she made those meaningless marks in the mud with her umbrella—and an intense, lingering, melting, weeping delight in the smallest familiar earth-objects. It was the sight of this poplar tree with its rubbed and disfigured bark and with certain enchanting and almost mystical shadows on some of its branches, as they wavered in the light breeze, which transported her then and thrilled her through and through with a tearful rapture at being still alive.

Mr. Evans took only about two minutes to reach her from the moment when he first came round the corner; but during those two minutes Miss Crow had experienced the eternal alternations, the great antipodal feelings of human experience, the shudder of death and “the pleasure which there is in life itself!” And she was a woman lo miss little, though she kept her own counsel of these experiences!

She thought to herself: 'There's that man Evans coming! Ill get him to send me that St. Augustine Sam talked about; and I'll give it to Mat. I can afford that now!" How fast the mind moves from margin to margin of these opposite feelings! Mr. Evans was rapidly coming to a point within hearing; and if she wanted to speak to him about St. Augustine she would have to stop him; and yet behind Mr. Evans5 approaching figure and behind the image of that expensive book, and even behind the image of Mat Dekker's pleasure in the book, that cold, shuddering recoil still possessed her, and that magical light flickering on the poplar tree still possessed her.

The invisible watchers—those scientific collectors of interesting human experiences in this ancient town—communicated to one another the conclusion that certain essences and revelations are caught and appropriated by an old maiden lady, like Miss Crow, which are never touched by turbulent, tormented lives like those of Mr. Evans and Codfin.

How could Mr. Evans, now lifting his hat to greet this dignified figure of voluminous skirts and flounced bosom, become a medium for these calm platonic essences? What could Codfin, who was risking the hangman's rope for the sake of the mania of a madwoman, know of the deep natural shrinking of a normal heart in the presence of death, or of its rapturous awareness of the enchantment of what it is leaving?

Miss Crow had arranged to meet Lady Rachel and Athling for lunch at the Pilgrims' that day. She1 was a little nervous in her heart of hearts about this encounter, because in her growing disapproval—shared it may well be imagined by the girl's father— of the intimacy in which the lovers now seemed to be living, she had of late avoided seeing Ned Athling. Rachel still officially lived with her; but there had been whole nights when the girl had remained working, so she declared, in the offices of the Wayfarer; and gossip had already begun to speak on the prolonged visits she paid to the bachelor attic which the young editor had furnished for himself above these offices.

Lord P. had had recently several grave and diplomatic talks with Miss Crow as to what measures they could take to stop the outbreak of a serious scandal; but neither she nor he had yet dared to risk any drastic ultimatum to the wilful girl for fear of precipitating the very disaster they dreaded.

“I shan't stay long after lunch,” Miss Crow thought, as she responded to the salute of Mr. Evans, “and I won't go to their printing-place with them today. I'll get them to leave me free for the afternoon; and I'll go to Wirral Hill, if I'm not too exhausted, and sit on that seat where Mat and I used to sit thirty years ago.”

She beckoned now to Mr. Evans and he came up to where she was and stood in front of her. There was something about Miss Crow—her Devereux mother perhaps—that commanded more respect from the Glastonbury tradesmen than any other person in the town.

Mr. Evans, though certainly not a tradesman, was not insensible to this quality, and he stood awkwardly now, but quite deferentially, waiting what she had to say.

“You've got rather an expensive edition of St. Augustine among your books, haven't you, Mr. Evans?” she said quietly.

“Yes, Mam,” admitted Number Two's partner, “the best on the market.”

It is an old and bitter experience of the human race that when once a gulf-stream of a particular evil has got started, it is always being whipped forward by some new little breeze, or enlarged by some new little stream emptying itself into it. A magnetic power, it seems, in such a gulf-stream of evil, attracts these casual and accidental encouragements.

Why, of all things, should Mr. Evans have been reminded of their collection of books at that juncture, and why, of all their books, of the particular one that was neighbour to “The Unpardonable Sin”?

“I think, if your partner has not sold it yet,” said Miss Crow, “I'd like to have that book.”

“I'll put it aside for you, Mam,” murmured Mr. Evans. “It is expensive, I'm afraid, but if------”

“I'll be extravagant for once,” cried the lady with a smile. "

I think you can send it today if you've got anyone to send. You know my number in Benedict Street?"

Mr. Evans bowed. Everyone knew Miss Crow's number. Hadn't it been the chief topic of the town when she left her nephew's establishment and wTenl to live in a workman's cottage?

“I hope Mrs. Evans is well?” enquired the lady.

This simple question caused the brain of the hook-nosed man, bending towards her, to whirl up in an angry revolt against the smoothed-out pigeonhole of public propriety in which a married tradesman lived. It rose to the tip of his tongue, in his nervous state, to ask this quiet embodiment of conventional dignity some outrageous question in return; such as “How does your Tossie feel, married to Mr. Barter?” or “How will you manage about the way Lady Rachel is carrying on with young Athling?”

“Very well, Mam, thank you,” he replied. And then he even took upon himself to add, “WeVe got a house that's quite easy for her to look after.”

Miss Crow smiled. “Fm glad to hear that. It's a mistake for young married women to be overworked.” She made a little movement then with the handle of her umbrella to signify that she had no further need for Mr. Evans' society.

The Welshman straightened his back, bowed to her in a manner that even Mrs. Geard could not have felt disgraced the House of Rhys, and went off, settling his hat upon his head as he went in little angry jerks and vowing that he would not remove it again till he reached his destination.

He was hardly gone—for Miss Crow had selected a very public place for her matutinal rest—than Comrade Trent, as the populace in their mocking rustic humour always called him, came softly and airily by. Miss Elizabeth only just knew Paul Trent “to speak to,” as they say, and she was cordially prejudiced against the man. She had long ago put down, in her heart, this whole wretched business of the new regime to this alien from the Scilly Isles.

It was clearly he who had devised the scheme of buying the leases and the ground-rents from the lord of the manor and doling out, in this pauperising manner, all that the visitors brought in among the town's poor. Neither honest Dave, nor that hot-headed agitator Robinson, and certainly not Mr. Geard with his fancies, would have had the wit to plot such a daring move. Miss Elizabeth had scant admiration for her nephew Philip, hut she felt sorry for him and even sympathetic with him, when she beheld this affected, sly, young lawyer prancing about the town as if he were the master of all. In the relations between human beings it is always natural to attribute the grossest selfish motives to the people we instinctively dislike.

Of the real Paul Trent, who inherited from his mother an idealism passionate as that of the poet Shelley, and who would have perished willingly on a barricade if he could have started an anarchistic revolution, Miss Crow knew absolutely nothing. “Good morning, Miss Crow,” said Paul Trent, “enjoying this beautiful weather?”

“Au contraire, Mr. Trent, I'm doing my accounts! Before plunging into Wollop's, you know, a woman has to think out what she can afford without ruining herself. I always slip off, in the middle of my shopping day, to do a little solitary thinking.” This allusion to Wollop's was a covert feminine taunt at this arrogant young man; for it was well known in the town that Mr. Wollop owned his shop and the ground it stood on in fee simple. Wollop's, like the Glastonbury bank, remained an obstinate island of capitalism in a socialistic lake.

“What a treasure your Mr, Wollop is!” murmured Paul Trent; and taking advantage of this faint crack in the ice—like a cat rubbing itself against the knees of someone who hates cats—he proceeded to slip down into the seat at her side. “How do you like our new Glastonbury constitution?” he asked her in an airy tone.

“I don't meddle with politics, Sir,” she replied; and the way she moved away from him as she spoke seemed to add: “And I can't abide politicians!”

“I agree with you entirely,” he said; and then, to Miss Crow's horror, he pulled up one of his soft neatly socked legs upon the seat between them and slipped his arm along the back of the bench.

“I'll get up the minute my heart stops thumping,” the lady thought. '"What does this objectionable young man want with mer

“A woman like you, Miss Crow,” he went on, with what she thought was pure impertinence, “can understand better what I am doing in Glastonbury than the most intelligent man could.”

Miss Crow tapped the ground with her umbrella. Then she produced a clicking noise between her tongue and her teeth; and having expressed with these physical movements her disapproval of Paul Trent, she made her mock-modest retort to his ambiguous compliment by uttering the syllables “Tut-tut-tut!” But her insidious invader only pulled his rounded feminine knee and his neatly trousered calf a little further along the seat of the bench and slid his delicately moulded hand an inch nearer along its back, till the scrupulously clean nail of his little finger was within the length of a sparrow's beak of Miss Crow's jacket collar. These outward gestures, which gave his companion a tickling sensation down her spine, were methods of approach inherited from his father, a Cornishman who had the suavity of some old Phoenician trader; but below all this there stirred in Paul Trent an intense idealistic longing, inherited from his mother, to convert Miss Crow to his revolutionary ideas.

“I'm very serious, lady,” he said. “You mustn't get cross with me. There really aren't so many women one can talk to in Glastonbury. Most of my thoughts are entirely wasted on these people.”

“This nice, unusual day seems to make you moralise, Mr. Trent, just as it makes me sit in the sun and wonder about my bills.”

“What I've found out is,” he went on eagerly, quite oblivious of this snub, “that none of these people, that you quite properly call politicians, Miss Crow, know what liberty is. The capitalists take liberty away from us in the name of liberty, which, under them, means liberty to work like a slave, or, to starve. But your relative Mr. Spear isn't much better! He takes liberty away from the individual in the name of the community. So there you are, you see! I am probably the only man in Glastonbury who fights for real liberty—which means, of course, a voluntary association of free spirits to enjoy the ideal life—but women understand these things much better. It was my mother who------”