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Nurse Robinson nodded. “ 'Ee says ”tis the law,“ she responded. ” 'Ee says HiVe 'a given “er already more'n the law allows. ”Ee says if the chemist gave me more for 'er till hate tomorrow, I should be 'eld responsible if anythink 'appened."

“You must excuse me, Mr. Geard,” cried Mat Dekker, snatching his coat and hat from a peg. 'Til come straight with you to the doctor's, Nancy, and stir him up. Ill take the responsibility myself. It's outrageous. Itfs intolerable. Penny!“ The square servant advanced down the passage at her master's summons. ”Don't go to bed till Mr. Sam comes in, Penny, and keep something hot for his supper. He may have been walking miles and miles."

“We do know where he have been walking!” grumbled Penny. uFll stay up for he, right and certain, Master, and when he comes in, it'll go hard but I'll give he a piece of me mind, gal-lumping over they girt moors, to the disturbance of our decent house—and all because of a whey-faced missy what's another man's wife!“”

“Hush! Hush, Penny!” commanded .ier master, nodding towards Mr. Geard to indicate that they were not alone. “Help the gentleman into his coat, Penny, can't you? Our way lies in the same direction, doesn't it, Sir?” he went on. “Ready, Nurse? You've got your breath again? That poor woman . . . left alone in positive torture . . . Perhaps you'd prefer to walk more slowly, Mr. Geard? But Nurse and I must hurry on!”

Bloody Johnny proved himself able to walk quite as fast as his companions, though it is true he covered the ground in rather an eccentric manner. He walked with a sort of doL-a^d-co-c::** step, and in addition to this mode of progression he aLo had a kind of sailor's lurch, as if lie had just landed from a rnllhi:: deck. '"What doctor are }ou going to disturb*/** lie enquired breathlessly when they reached the town.

“'Doctor Fell. Sir. Doctor Fell,” replied the nurse. "Doctor Fell be a kind-hearted man. but he lives with Is old sister Miss BiKby who be reglar devil And if we ring at Doctor's door it won't be the doctor we'll see. We'll see old Bibby for sure and Bibby'll knock our 'eads off waking of 5er up/'

“I'll have the doctor out of bed,” muttered Mr. Dekker grimly, “if once you get them to open the door for us, Nurse.”'

But at this point Mr. Geard laid his hand on the Vicar's arm. “Let me go with Miss Robinson and sit up with this woman/” he said. “You can telephone to my family when you return home, so that they w7on't be alarmed. I can sleep wherever I am. It's a trick I possess.”

Mat Dekker showed some impatience at this. “It isn't a question of sitting up wTith her, Mr. Geard. It's a question of stopping the torture she's enduring. It's a question of giving her sleep! Morphia alone can do that.”

“Christ alone can do that!55 cried Bloody Johnny in a voice that sounded like the voice of an angry boatswain, so resonantly did it reverberate through the empty street! ”Pardon me. Sir,*' he went on. “Pardon me, Miss Robinson. When I said just now that I w7ould sit up with this woman, I meant of course that in the Power of the Blood I would send her to sleep. Please take me there quickly, Nurse! There is no reason why we should trouble Mr. Dekker any more tonight. Only don't forget, Mister, to telephone to Mrs. Geard.”

^ Nurse Robinson looked from one to the other. They were all three now standing outside Saint John's Churchyard, in the obscurity of which the Holy Thorn was just visible and the vast bulk of the shadowy tower. But Mat Dekker's face was clouded with indecision. He kept turning his head, first to the right and then to the left under the pressure of Mr. Geard's words, exactly as a large dog might have done under a human eye. He seemed unwilling to look at Mr. Geard. He struck the pavement with tbft end of hi& stick once ur twice, muttering. “Well, I don't know, on my soul. I really don't know.” Then, with a deeply drawn breath and a queer, little, fluttering movement of one of his big hands, “Come,”' he said, fciand see what you can do. But for God's sake let's be quick! She may be crazy with the pain.*'

Walking fast up George Street they were soon at Tittie Pether-ton's ruined Gothic cottage. Nurse Robinson opened the door and went in first. A small oil-lamp was burning on the kitchen-table and a black, sooty kettle simmered feebly upon a coal-stove whose fire had almost gone out Nurse Robinson had begun to turn up the wick of the little lamp when they were startled by a moan of anguish more horribly acute than Mat Dekker had ever heard in his life. He had heard Tittle's groans before, under her abominable afHiction . . . but never a sound quite like that. The blood rushed to his face. “Damn these doctors!” he cried. Nurse Robinson glanced at Mr. Geard to see what effect this horrible sound had upon him. She was astonished to see his face twisted in a spasm of physical pain. She was so startled by the twisted mouth of Mr. Geard that she found herself expecting to hear from it the same cry of torment as that which they had just heard from the room above. But the spasm was over in a second of time and she turned to the door which concealed the steps that led to her patient's bedroom. Up these steps she now climbed, followed first by Mat Dekker and then by Mr. Geard. There wTas a second little oil-lamp, identical with the one downstairs, upon a table by the bedside, above which the massive eaves of the roof sloped down.

A gaunt woman, propped upon pillows, who had pulled herself up so desperately to a sitting posture that the bed-clothes were clinging in a disordered mass about her knees, was leaning forward with a terribly fixed stare. She beg,.n at once an incoherent and piteous pleading. “Have you the stuff? Have you brought the stuff? Oh, for Jesus' sake, give me the stuff! Is it there? Have you got it?” At this point she gasped and struggled for breath, clutching at her body with her fingers. Then she began again. “Give me the stuff, Nurse, give it to me quickly! If I don't have it, this minute, I shall curse Them Above. Oh, the stuff! the stuff! I want nothing but the stuff!”

Mat Dekker was aware of a sleepy twittering above the sutler-pipe outside the window. “'Sparrows,” he said to himself, “but too early for nesting ... a little too early; but they must be thinking of it . . . they must be pairing.” The oil-lamp reeked vilely, and from the tortured woman's bed there emanated a sweeiish-sour and very sickly smell, which made Mat Dekker shudder as he stood there mute and helpless. It was as if, beyond and behind the living-room, some unspeakable Entity of Pain writhed in the darkness, and it was from the substance of this thing and not from any human flesh and blood that this abominable smell issued forth.

Nurse Robinson approached the bed. “Lie down now, Mrs. Petherton. It'll be better if you lie down. There! Let me turn your pillows.” The woman opened her mouth and drew in her lips. Her expression was that of a despairing animal who would blindly bite at the whole world. But she allowed herself in her weakness to be laid flat upon the pillow by the strong hands of the nurse.

Then Mat Dekker approached the bed and folding his great knuckles together and bowing his grey head began praying: "In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, give unto this woman, thy poor stricken servant, 0 God, strength to endure the grievous sufferings which Thou in Thy wisdom

hast been pleased-------" He got no further, for the woman's eyes.

which she had momentarily closed, opened again and a look of renewed torment, combined with wild hatred for the priest, came into her face. Nor was this all. Unable in any other way to express the abyss of her defiance she made the motion of spitting at the worthy man. Her wretched drop of ejected saliva did no more than drip down the wrinkles of her own cheek. But Dekker caught her intention and it froze his heart.

It was at this moment that Mr. Geard came forward. Unobserved by his companions he had removed his coat and waistcoat, and now showed himself in his purple braces and grey shirt. He did not even look at the woman's face. To the astonishment of the others he stretched himself out flat by her side upon the bed, using the little table as a support for one of his great elbows. Mat Dekker could not help noticing that the bulge of his stomach had burst the top button of his trousers. But from this position he rolled his eyes towards the nurse. “Put summat under me head, will 'ee, kindly/' he muttered, relapsing into the broadest Somerset. The nurse promptly obeyed him5 snatching a faded cushion from a chair on the further side of the attic. ”Take thik lamp away, one o? ye, if ye doant mind. No! No! Put the little bugger on floor. Missus, where't woant shine in our pore eyes.“ Again the astonished nurse obeyed this singular authority, placing the lamp in the centre of the floor, and turning the wick down as low as she dared. ”Now, Tittie, old gurl, thee and me be 'a goin' to have some blessed sleep. I be drowsy as a spent bullick, I be. Night to ye both; night to ye all. Tittie and me be all right. Us 'ull be safe and sound till mornin'. And then maybe ye'll bring up a cup o' tea for we to bless the Lord in!"

With the lamp placed where it was, it had become impossible now for either Mr. Dekker or Miss Robinson to see anything but two blurred human faces, laid side by side. “Are we really to leave you like this, Mr. Geard?” enquired Mat Dekker. Not a sound, not a movement came from the bed. The priest picked up Mr. Geard's overcoat and his other clothes from wThere the man had let them fall on the floor. These objects he carefully stretched out over Bloody Johnny's prostrate form. “Come, Nancy,” he muttered. “For God's sake let's do exactly what he says. I- really think that, by the mercy of God, he's done what I couldn't do; and perhaps”—here he sighed deeply—“what no doctor could do. Come, Nancy! Better leave them just as they are.” He led the way down the narrow stairs, and Nurse Robinson followed after him. The nurse looked at a dilapidated arm-chair covered with a big red shawl full of holes which stood by one of the Gothic windows. Mat Dekker lifted up the sooty kettle and peeped into the stove. “Wait a second, Nancy,” he said. He opened the back door of the wretched room, from the rafters and walls of which the damp of centuries seemed to emanate. A draught of chilly midnight air entered and made the little lamp flicker and the shadow of Nurse Robinson move portentously across the yellowish strips of torn wallpaper that hung from the opposite wall.

He returned in a minute, carrying a bundle of small pieces or wood pressed against his black waistcoat. These he piled up by the side of the stove, and then threw into the aperture the most auspicious-looking of the pieces. •'Well! I'll be getting home, Nance,'“ he said. ”You'll be all right, won't 'ee?“ He moved up to a small cupboard and shamelessly opened it. '”Yes, you've got some tea and some biscuits, I see. Have you got anything to read?“ He looked round, but could see nothing except Tittie Petherton's great family Bible. Being the man he was, this particular work seemed in some way inadequate for a night-lono-vigil. He searched his great overcoat pockets and giving a grunt of satisfaction extracted from one of them a small copy of White's Selborne. This he presented to the watcher with many nods and smiles. ” 'Twill help 'ee awake or send 'ee to sleep, Nance, just as 'ee do have a mind!" Like Geard of Glastonbury, Mr. Dekker was always ready to revert at a pinch to the West-Country turns of speech. In sheer physical relief at escaping from the strain of Tittie Petherton's suffering the good man now rubbed his big hands together and chuckled benevolently. For the last quarter of an hour he had forgotten Whitelake Cottage! Thus, in the huge compensatory ebb and flow of great creative Nature, one tension of human feeling has the power of ejecting, or completely cancelling, another strain of feeling. For the emotional tension of a frustrated passion there is no better cure than to spend an hour or two in the presence of terrible bodily anguish. Mat Dekker was not an idealist, but he was a man of a proud and stormy heart, and what he had seen tonight had had the famous Aristotelian effect upon him. As he walked rapidly home, however, down George Street and High Street and Silver Street, this catharsis relaxed its calming force. By the time he reached the gate of his Vicarage, poor Tittie and her heretical hypnotist were forgotten. He found his heart beating, his pulses throbbing, to the old fatal tune. Had Sam come back?

He strode up the winding driveway and burst into the hall of his house. “Penny!” he shouted. “Penny!” The old servant came grumbling and blinking out of her kitchen where she had been asleep in her chair. “Has Sam come home?” he enquired sternly.

“Not that I knows, Master,” the woman answered; “not unless he crept upstairs on his stockinged feet.”

Mat Dekker ran upstairs just as he was, too perturbed in mind to take off either his hat or his coat. He flung open the door of Sam's bedroom. Empty it was with that indescribable look of desolation that bedrooms of the absent and of the dead so quickly assume; and Sam's father stood for a second on the dimly lit landing, chewing the bitter cud of remediless loss. Then he went slowly to his own bedroom; and having telephoned to the Geards' house to tell them what had become of their man, he undressed and sought his pillow.

But the priest's rest that night was feverish and disturbed. Nor was its Vicar the only troubled sleeper in Glastonbury. Under many of her roofs, from the brick tilings of the Town Council's houses in Benedict Street, to the slate roofs of the tradesmen's villas in Wells Street, outraged and wounded hearts kept human souls awake.

Perhaps in one house alone there was absolute peace, in one house alone a “deep and liquid rest, forgetful of all ill,” and that was the house in which Bloody Johnny and Tittie Petherton slept on the same bed.

CONSUMMATION

When Sam Dekker reached Whitelake Cottage that day it was nearly four o'clock. He had remained standing motionless once or twice during his rapid walk; standing in that fixed position and in that same abstracted trance into which it is recorded that the philosophic Socrates fell at certain crises in his life; and he had no idea how long these moments of abstraction had lasted. Once at the place, however, he knocked resolutely at the door. There was a sound inside which made him think that the young mistress of the house was upstairs, cleaning the floor; and when the girl came running down to let him in, this supposition proved the correct one, for she was garbed in a long, green linen over-all, covering the whole of her dress.