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It was already too obscure in that shed, as they faced a long jagged blood-line in the west fading slowly out, the last of the May-Day journey-prints of the sun, for him to see the faint flickering up of a tantalised hope that these words of his summoned into her face.

“I must confess to you something, Nell, though it's to my shame. Penny Pitches, our servant, my old nurse and foster-mother, followed me up to my bedroom last night and talked about you.”

He had the wit to feel that Nell winced at this and he hurriedly added—"You mustn't mind, dearest. I'm only telling you this because I want you to know the very worst of me. It's a

penance to me to speak of it. But I can't bear------"

“Sam!” She was sitting very straight up now by his side. He could not see her face but he felt the indignant tension of her nerves. “Sam, it's like this. I can put up with what you do to me, and make me bear, when you do it from your own self. But to have to listen—no! you must hear me out!—to> have to listen to what other women think, of the way you're treating me, it's too much!”

“Little Nell”—he spoke with a vibrancy in his voice that was new to her in him and that awed her a little—“I've come to see that there is something queer about me . . . that I didn't realise. I've come to see that I have thought only of my own feelings and have been stupid and blind to yours. I've come to see that in the whole thing there's been a lack in me ... I don't know how to say it ... a lack of power to see things, as they appear—as they are—to others ... to you. As I lay thinking about it all last night—after Penny had gone away—I felt as if I could see myself as I never have done before. My cowardice . . ., my weakness . . . seemed to—I don't know how to put it!—seemed to take an actual shape in the darkness! I shall never forget it. The darkness glittered all about me. It was phosphorescent. Spurts and splashes of light, shootings and jettings of light and there I was in the middle of it . . . like a great black slug. It wasn't a nightmare, for I was absolutely wide-awake; I wasn't even sleepy* But I suddenly knew, when I felt myself to be that black slug, that I was grosser than other human beings. I knew that I had a dead nerve ... an atrophied nerve ... in me . . . where certain feelings ought to be.”

He stretched himself out by her side and shifted into a more comfortable position. He mechanically took a packet of cigarettes from his pocket, fumbled with them, remembered that he mustn't smoke, and put them back again.

“I mean by a dead nerve that there are feelings in human beings which save them from acting in a certain way and from doing certain things . . . and that this nerve has never been touched in me. I knew when I became that slug in the middle of those phosphorescent lights that in the way Fd acted to you Fd behaved blindly, monstrously—without using that nerve!”'

He could not have realised how intently her eyes were fixed on him. He could not have realised how her mouth was drawn down and hanging open; how her lower lip was pulled awry, just as if it were imitating in unconscious sympathy the way his own face worked!

But he went on as if she had been some exterior conscience that he was talking to, some conscience to whom he had to confess everything, everything! “It gave me a sudden shock of fear, of ghastly fear, when I realised that I lacked that human nerve which everyone else has. I was afraid of myself, Nell. It was as if I had put my hand to my back and suddenly found that I was growing a tail! It was as if I had looked into the looking-glass, and seen, not my own face, but the face of a beast. I felt alone and set apart, as if I were a pariah, a leper, a half-man.”

“Oh, Sam, my dear love, my poor, sweet Sam, come back to me and let me love you again!”

Any onlooker at this scene catching the emotion in her voice would have supposed that he would turn to her now and press her to his heart. He did not do anything of the kind—he went on talking, but he laid his hand on her wrist as it rested in the hay and gripped it tight.

“I loathed myself when I saw how blind Fd been about it all . . . about you and about our child . . . and everything. I tried to think out what kind of a lack it is in me that makes me so that I can't go straight off with you and leave Glastonbury. For I can't do it, my sweet! I thought of doing it last night just before dawn, hours after Penny had gone away. I thought of making Father give me money, and taking the train with you to London. I imagined us getting into the train. I could even see how that little shanty would look, as the train pulled out, where John Crow works! But when I thought of it I knew—all in a moment—that I couldn't do it. I grew cold and paralysed, like in dreams, when I took the first step . . . but I want to tell you this, Nell,”—his voice dropped to a solemn whisper—“when I thought of us getting into the train / thought of us as three. So you see, though I haven't got that 'nerve' I've got something. Oh, Nell, fve been so unhappy these last days! I don't know why I tell you. What's the use of telling you—you who have to bear it all? But I've been more unhappy than I thought I could be. I've been torn in two between you and Christ and it's made me very unhappy. I knew I'd have to bear a lot for Him, if I let Him take me, but I never thought it would be anything like this.”

“My poor, sweet Sam, come back to me!” the girl whispered, cuddling close up to him in the hay and clinging to his elbow.

“I can't, Nell,” he groaned, “I can't. Christ has got me by the throat, by the hair of my head. If you made me come to you tonight He would pull me back to Him. I can't escape from Him! He's going to hold me tighter and tighter all my life.” Sam shuddered as he uttered these words. With the warmth of her body against his as they lay side by side in the soft hay, his nature was so stirred within him that a blasphemous fury seized him with the Being who was causing him and his love so much suffering.

“No! He's got me, my darling, my sweet, my only love. He's got me and there's no help for it.”

“Sam, stop! I can't let you talk like this! It's the Devil you're talking about, not Christ! Christ would never want to separate people who love each other as we do.”

Sam tore himself from her embrace and scrambled up upon his feet. She saw him outlined dark against the doorway. His figure seemed to contort and to twist, as with frightened eyes she stared at him. “Never want to separate us! You don't know Him, Nell. He's a lover, I tell you—a lover ... a lover!” He almost shouted these words at her as she lay there on the ground. Then he swung round and stood in the doorway.

The evening of this perfect May Day was of a loveliness comparable with die hours that had preceded it. In certain subtle respects it was even more beautiful, just as in certain ways sleep is more beautiful than waking and death than life. But into the loveliness of this evening Sam Dekker poured the bitterness of his heart. He beat his hands on his head and then stretched out his arms with his fists clenched.

“A lover . . . that's what you are, . • . a lover ... a cruel lover!” Nell was not a particularly nervous girl. She took Sam's excitement for a sort of religious madness—as it very likely may have been—but she felt vibrant concern for him. In fact, she forgot for the moment the brutality of his desertion of her in her anxiety for him. He could not have selected a better psychological trick in order to make his treatment of her tolerable, and it may well be—such is the labyrinthine subtlety of the human mind—that mingled with the genuine anguish of his frustrated passion there was a thin thread of awareness in him that to simulate more than he actually felt was the best way of distracting her from her own suffering.

Beyond the dark figure of her equivocal lover, leaning sullenly now against one of the doorposts of their shed, she caught sight of the evening star. This luminous planet hung low above the place where the sun had sunk; and as when her love was first menaced by Zoyland's outburst, on the evening when father and son had come to Whitelake, this planet had cast its spell upon her, so now once more this great Being, the one which, after the Sun and the Moon, holds the highest place among the heavenly bodies, dominated her troubled consciousness and held her attention; until she was aware of a sort of comfort coming from its beauty as it floated there in that greenish-coloured ocean of space. But although she knew it not, and in all likelihood, the great planet knew it not, there flowed forth from that swimmer in that far-off greenish sea a magical influence which soothed the girl as soon as it touched her, and brought her a faint return of hope. After the Sun and the Moon, but a long way before the other lords of the sky, whether planets or constellations, this great luminary, either as Evening Star or as Morning Star, has gathered to itself the worship of the generations. Feeling its power upon her now, though not knowing what it was she was feeling, Nell got up from her hay couch, brushed her clothes mechanically and came over to where Sam was. There they stood together staring at the dying glow in that greenish sky and at the increasing size and brilliance of that solitary star.

She put her hand on his shoulder and he let it remain there. The evening itself gathered them into its own universal and primordial sadness—the sadness of all lost chances and lost causes since history began. Under the power of that moment, of the slow dying of that unequalled day, these two and their child within her did indeed become a conscious three as he had imagined. But the third was more than a child. The liquid immensity of that hushed twilight enlarged that little embryonic identity into something over-shadowing and mysterious, something that became the premonitory presence of that unknown future which was before them both. On its soft muffled wings this embodiment of their fate flew across their vision, its silent flight pressing down still more, like the fall of a handful of feathers from the brooding breast of the night itself, the lowered pulse of the earth's huge swing into darkness.

There came over Nell's mind the slow, faint intimation that it would be useless to struggle any more to bind Sam to her side. As she leaned against his shoulder now in her tragic acquiescence she felt that this was the moment in her life when she must gather her forces together and accept her destiny, struggle no more against it but adjust herself to it as best she might. Always would she love this strange man by her side, so much older in his troubled thoughts than he was in inexperienced years. But her love must accept the hint of this largely expanded, fragrant twilight, darkening slowly, tenderly, solemnly befoie her eyes, smelling vaguely of primroses and moss.

“Sam!” she whispered softly.

He turned his discomforted face towards her, and she seemed in that obscure light to detect upon it a pitiful appeal to her that she should have mercy upon him and not drive him to desperation; not compel him to struggle to do what it was beyond his nature to do.

“Sam,” she repeated. “You shall do exactly what you want. Oh, my darling, oh, my poor Sam! It's more than I can bear to see you so troubled. Our love has been very sweet to me,”—her voice trembled a little but it did not break—“but it must accept what has come to it; and so it shall be. You have changed my life. In my heart I shall be always yours and never anyone else's.”

He made no answer but she heard him swallow down a queer sort of half-animal sob.

OMENS AND ORACLES

MAT DEKKER WAS RIGHT WHEN HE SAID THAT A TOWN WHICH has had so long an historic continuity as Glastonburv acquires a personality of its own. And just as in human organisms there are slowly developed changes, sometimes maladies, sometimes regenerations, which take place under the surface and then at a crisis burst out into prominence, so does it happen with any community as old and intricate as this one. Individual agencies help to bring about these upheavals, but the preparation for them is a long, silent, hidden growth, subject quite as much to the influence of non-human forces as to the will of humanity.

Old Dr. Fell and his sister Barbara were to dine at Abbey House one day early in June—to be exact on June the Second— and when this day came there was the usual fuss and stir all over the rambling, untidy dwelling where for some fifty years the brother and sister had lived at the corner of Northload Street and Manor House Road. Though the Fells had lived here so long it was notorious that their successive batches of maids only stayed with them for very limited periods, such was the cantankerous and testy disposition of Miss Barbara Fell. Thus when any day arrived for a real dining out, and this came only some half a dozen times a year, the Doctor's best dress-tie and Miss Barbara's best piece of black lace, and sometimes even her tiger-claw brooch set in opals, were apt to be in the wrong drawer or in the wrong chest of drawers. Dr. Fell took the precaution on this occasion of being dressed a complete hour before it was necessary. He had learned by bitter experience that* it wTas advisable that the dressing difficulties of the two of them should not occur simultaneously! Dr. Fell in this crafty manner took upon himself to outwit the malevolence of Hobbididance, the Demon of curst households. And so now he sat in his receiving room awaiting the forward-glide of events and reading the Enchiridion of Epictetus. Dr. Fell was not unaware that he lived in a town which had a very ancient Christian Church. He had indeed only to ascend the eastern slope of Wirral Hill to discover, set up by the Town Council, when Wollop's predecessor was Mayor, a handsomely inscribed marble slab upon which was recorded the fact that, thirty-one years after the Death of cur Saviour, Joseph of Arimathea brought His Blood to this spot. Dr. Fell was also in a position to discover in the guide-books the fact that not only was the church in his town the oldest church, Orbis Terrarum, in the whole earth, but that this fact had been sustained against rival churches at the Council of Pisa in 1409, at the Council of Constance in 1417, at the Council of Siena in 1424, and at the Council of Basle in 1434, establishing beyond refutation that Glaslonbury possessed a church that had been founded statlm post passionem Chrisli—“immediately after the Passion of Christ.” Nevertheless although he denied not that he lived in a town where perhaps an altar still existed thai had been used in the original wattle-edifice, built by one who had touched the flesh of the Man-God, Dr. Fell was not a Christian. He was, on the contrary, a Stoic, and when he was not reading for the thousandth time the sturdy logoi of the stoical slave, he was reading for the hundredth time the wistful meditations of the stoical Emperor.