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“No,” John's voice replied. And oh how she dreaded the tone he was using now! It was not a frank, single-hearted, trusting lover's tone. “No,” said John, “she never told me you'd spoken of that.”

“It came to nothing, of course,” said the other, “and I changed my mind about it before you came along. . . . Are you going to marry her?”

At this point Mary let the parcel containing the tablecloth slip down to the floor between her body and the balustrade. She thrust her fingers into her ears and ran hurriedly down the stairs. Down both flights of stairs she ran, and it was not till she was out of the house that she realised that she'd dropped her parcel. Her misery of mind rose up now out of all proportion to its cause.

She had come to feel towards that room of John's a peculiarly tender feeling, the feeling that a woman naturally gets towards her first real possession. To find that that room, which had been of late the centre of all her thoughts by day and by night, was being turned into a ramshackle bachelors' rendezvous was an outrage to something so deep in her that her emotion about if puzzled herself. She felt as if she were an outsider—a light-of-love—whose visits to number fifteen were devoid of all lasting significance. And Tom's tone about Glastonbury—how she disliked it! Those many secret meetings with John she had had in St. Mary's ruined Chapel had recently, -by a natural process of association, begun to convert her to the ancient place. And this room—her room with John, their menage together—to have it henceforth associated with Barter's rough cynicism and supercilious brutality was the last straw. For herself she cared nothing abont his thinking of her as a girl he had decided against marrying. It was only John's hurt vanity she was nervous about. She herself was only too thankful he had decided a^aiiisi i-../ Besides—always was she Mary Crow. Her personal pride was far too deep to be affected by the opinion of her held by any man. No, it was none of these things that rankled now in her heart and made her face so white and tense as she hurried back to the Abbey House. It was something much deeper, something that she had secretly been dreading ever since those two sacred Northwold days. It was in fact a dark, bitter, suspicious, corrosive and yet intangible jealousy of Tom Barter. She knew—none better than she—what a deep vein there was of erotic attraction to men in John's nature. She knew—and she had good cause to know—how little of the normal, passionate lover there was about him. She and he were bound together by imponderable cravings, by inexplicable, magnetic lusts, which were as sterile as they were intense and unsatisfied. Had he already possessed her as men possess women, what would she have to fear, what to be jealous of, in his love for Tom? She would belong to him as Tom never could belong to him. It was because she knew that she might never be possessed in that sense, even though they were married by the most apostolical of priestly hands, that she felt the ghastly fingers of cold fear fumbling at her vitals. Not a single tear trickled down her cheek as she walked resolutely home. Home she walked with steady lips and a swift, quiet tread. Home to Miss Euphemia Drew!

When Miss Drew, a quarter of an hour later, asked her, “Was it not a nice, warm day for March,” she found she could not remember one single moment when she had been conscious of warmth or of the absence of warmth. That, however, did not prevent her giving the old lady a lively and picturesque account of her visit to Wollop's.

“What did you go in to buy, my pretty?”

“I went in to buy some hairpins, dear.”

Miss Drew took up a little piece of one of Louie's most successful tea-cakes and nibbled at it elegantly with her false teeth* There was a physical stir at the bottom of Miss Drew's stomach as she delicately lifted up her tea-cup, her little finger fastidiously extended, to wash down—for otherwise she would have had difficulty in swallowing—this honey-sweet fragment. Well did she know that Mary was lying when she spoke of hairpins. And Mary, sitting opposite her, every now and then taking a whifi of eau-de-Cologne from a little green-edged handkerchief, made for her by Miss Drew, knew that she knew that she had lied. Miss Drew's inmost feelings at the moment when Lily answered the bell and went away, in dreamy sadness, to bring more hot water, might have been described in the following manner: “She is buying things for that male brute to furnish some slum-room in the town. She's either married him already or she's going to live with him as if they were married. It”s almost more than I can bear, but I must be strong! If I lose her—but I can't think of it, consider it, imagine it—for a minute! I don't know why God has laid this upon me- But I've come to depend on her; and if------“ Miss Drew, even to herself, was forced to cover up the passion of her love for her companion by the use of the vague word ”depend." As a matter of fact, she loved Mary with a love like that which John would have had to content himself with if he had been forbidden by some inexplicable mandate to make love to her. Every movement of Mary's wTas delicious to Miss Drew. Every word she uttered entranced the poor lady. Every garment she wore was as sacred to her as the paten that held the bread at Holy Communion.

Lily was longer than usual fetching the hot water, and when she finally came in it was with a much quicker movement and a less dreamy gesture than usual that she laid down the little silver jug, a jug whose lid had been soldered once under the regime of Miss Drew's grandmother, and once more under the regime of Miss Drew's mother, beside the silver tea-pot.

“Please, Miss, Louie wants to know if you'd mind if we ran out for a minute to King Edgar's Lawn to see Mr. Crow's airplane. It's passing now, Weatherwax says, and Louie's never seen it close by.”

“Certainly; of course; run off; both of you!” replied Miss Drew; and she turned to her companion with the same look of benevolent superiority to the tastes of the lower classes that her grandmother displayed when her servants ran out to see the first bicycle and which her mother displayed when her servants ran out to see the first motor car. “King Edgar's Lawn” was a popular name that had locally arisen when a famous modern antiquary—guided, he himself declared, by supernatural agencv— had traced the foundations of that great monarch's chapel.

“Let's go out, child, and see this wonder ourselves!” said Mis* Drew, after filling the tea-pot from the silver jug.

The two ladies left the room together, picked up their cloaks in the hall, descended the terrace-steps, stepped carefully across a thin strip of crocuses and a sunken wall, and joined their maids and old Weatherwax on the smooth-cut expanse of velvety grass beyond which rose the ruins of the Tower Arch. It certainly was a startling sight to see the airplane. like a colossal dragonfly, cross the empty air-spaces above these historic Ruins.

Mr. Weatherwax, however, gave the thing the most brief and cursory glance. “Me broad-beans be going to make a fine show this year. Have 'ee been round to see 'em, Miss?”

Euphemia Drew took her arm away from the wrist of Mary * and turned her eyes from the calm expanse of the sky to the lesser but by no means negligible expanse of the countenance of Isaac Weatherwax. “Are they as high as our good friends' across the road, Isaac?”

This remark somewhat nonplussed the gardener. Between the •two gardens which he presided over he liked to keep up a pretended rivalry. He was “Weatherwax” to the Vicar, and “Isaac” to Miss Drew; and between “Isaac” and “Weatherwax” there was a lively competition. “Well, Miss,” he confessed, after a disdainful glance upward at the stupendous humming of the flying-machine, “Well, Miss, 'tis true they broad-beans across the way may be a miserable couple o' inches taller than ours. 'Tis when us considers the 'ealth and 'spansion o' the plants that ours do take the prize. They be vigorous growers, they beans of ours, and them tall ones can't hold a candle to 'en.”

Mary was thinking to herself, “Tom must have left John directly after I ran away, or he couldn't be piloting this thing now!”

The afternoon was slowly turning into evening. A delicate golden glow filled the western and the southern quarters of the firmament In the midst of this glow a number of rose-coloured clouds, floating filaments of vapour, air, feathery wefts, undulated, fluctuated, thickened, dissolved, as the chance-strewn catafalque of that particular day's obsequies limned itself in space.

Totally disregarding Tom Barter, who wTas gravely piloting the machine in the control of which his whole being seemed satisfied, Philip Crow was looking down intently at the moving panorama below them. How unfamiliar those ancient Ruins looked as he sawT them now gliding away beneath him—aye! and how unimportant, how negligible! Surely it was the round earth itself that was moving; not the shining, steely projectile in which he was being hurtled through the sky! He snatched a second to stare straight down at St. Michael's Tower on the top of the Tor as they shot drumming and droning over it. Philip's thoughts were disturbed at the moment. Three separate dangerous blows had been struck of late at him and his factories. Red Robinson's machinations had consummated in a formidable movement among the town-councillors to make Geard Mayor. Dave Spear had got twice as long a list of the factory-hands ready to strike than had been expected by either party. And now this crazy ne'er-do-well cousin of his, John Crow-, had opened an office near the station and was feverishly advertising some sort of religious hocus-pocus! This last blowT struck him the hardest; though it would have been hard to explain exactly why. Perhaps he himself could not have explained why. One thing wTas clear, all his own activity, all his own effort, all his own prestige were connected with turning Glas-tonbury from an idle show-place into a prosperous industrial centre. On this particular point he was at one with Red Robinson just as he was at one with Tom Barter. To beat down this pious Glastonbury legend, this piece of monkish mummery, to beat it down and trample it into dust He longed to do this beyond everything in the world except electrifying the entrails of the Men-dips; and he would do it too! He would do it alone if the labour element—short-sighted as it always was in regard to their true interests—betrayed him for this sneak-thief, this crafty hypocrite Geard!

He hoped at this moment that Barter would be minded to extend his circular hovering for hours so as to give him a long hawk's flight over this idyllic Somersetshire. He would conquer it, this effeminate flowTer-garden of pretty-pretty superstitions and mediaeval abracadabra! He would plant factory upon factory in it, dynamo upon dynamo! He would have mines beneath it. railways across it, airlines above it!

If Barter had not been a novice at flying and consequently afraid to remove his attention for a moment from his task, he might have divined his passenger's mental state and humoured him by staying up longer. But Philip was in no mood openly to confess such feelings. He had told his subordinate laconically enough to take him to Wookey Hole; and to Wookey Hole Barter must take him! There was a good field for landing on the Men-dips side of the Hole, away from the direction of Veils; but he decided to make a small detour first. Philip recognised the general lie of the land tonight and its natural landmarks more quickly than most passengers would have done in one of their first ascents. So might some hawk-eye among his Norman ancestors have surveyed the landscape from the high keep of some newly built castle and known it hill by hill, stream by stream, valley by valley, forest by forest, for what it was.

As he looked down upon the earth, that clear March evening, and watched the chess-board fields pass in procession beneath Iiim, and watched the trees fall into strange patterns and watched the villages, some red, some brown, some grey, according as brick or stone or slate predominated, approach or recede, as the plane sank or rose, Philip's spirit felt as if it had wings of its own that were carrying it over this conquered land independent of Barter's piloting. They passed over Havyatt, where the monks on one occasion persuaded the Danes to draw back and refrain from plundering the Abbey; they passed over West Pennard, and over Pylle and Evercreech; they passed over Batcombe and over Wan-straw and over Postlebury Wood; and it was not till they reached Marston Bigot where they could see to the eastward the livid-grey waters of the Somersetshire Frome that Barter swung the plane round and headed west again. Due west, they flew now, over the stone roofs of Shepton Mallet, straight to the city of Wells. When they were above Wells and they could look down on the Cathedral directly beneath them, they turned northwest; and soon, without trouble or mishap, they descended in the precise place they had aimed for, between Wookey Hole and Ebbor Rocks*

The impressions which rioted in Philip's brain as he clambered out of his seat, and stretched his legs upon solid earth in that darkening meadow, resembled the release of a charge of electricity. How small and unimportant Wells Cathedral had looked from up there in the air! It was of the planetary earth, a sensitised round orb circling through space, not of any calm earth-mother, lying back upon her secret life, that his mind was full. It had all passed only too quickly! It seemed only just a minute ago that he had scrambled into his seat on the back of this shining torpedo with dragon-fly wings. But what thoughts, what sensations! His brain whirled with the vision of an earth-life dominated absolutely by Science, of a human race that had shaken off its fearful childhood and looked at things with a clear, un-filmed, unperverted eye. He said to himself, as he walked out of the field with Barter—for they were intending to stay the night at Wookey Hole—that this conquest of air had reduced those Glastonbury Ruins to nothing. And how utterly unimportant and irrelevant all this disputing about capital and labour and private property! Science must soon, he thought, give into the hands of every individual so much power—power of creation, power of destruction—that this dogmatic doctrine about common ownership will cease to have any meaning.

“Don't wait supper for me,” he said to his companion as they closed the gate leading into the highway. He and Barter had their own particular bedrooms, in a little wayside inn called the Zoyland Arms, close to the entrance to Wookey Hole Cave. The factory there held no accommodation for travellers, for though its wheels were turned by the River Axe as it emerged from its underground caverns, it was not much more than a series of large workshops. The working-people came on foot or by lorry from the Wells suburbs which were only a couple of miles away and people who wished to remain overnight were at the mercy of the landlord of the inn. The two men were expected that evening to supper, and Will Zoyland was already seated at the parlour-table, with an uncorked bottle of wine at his side, enjoying his soup, when they entered the place.