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Mary was of a realistic and practical turn of mind, but her nerves felt thoroughly shaky now. In this cool dawn-air, alone with rooks, elm-tree tops, ruins and wood-pigeons, a thousand alarms and terrors visited her. She imagined all those factory-hands—the strikers from the Glastonbury works, the holiday-makers from Wookey—joining in a great mob and invading the field. She imagined a wild tumult taking place in the midst of the performance, wherein John would be arrested by the police, handcuffed, and carried off in a motor car to Taunton. The pageant itself, she had learned, was not to begin till two in the afternoon, but since a portion of the field had been handed over to the ordinary booth-holders, toy-and-sweet vendors, trinket sellers, fruit-and-nut dealers, and so forth—whirligigs and roundabouts alone being excluded—and since gipsy caravans too were to be allowed in by the Mayor's especial indulgence, there would be festivities going on in Tor Field long before that hour and plenty of opportunities for such a mixed public to work themselves up into a riotous state of mind before the official programme began.

It was with a shock of real amazement, as something that seemed more blood-red than sunlight hit the left-hand column of the great broken arch, that the girl lifted her head now. She let her twisted dressing-gown fall loose about her shoulders and propped herself still higher in the bed, with the palms of her iands pressed against the mattress, for she became aware that flie sight of this unnatural light—in reality it was a wine-coloured red, touched with a quite indescribable nuance of purple—was giving her a spasm of irrational happiness. She leaned forward, allowing her dislodged dressing-gown to slide down upon the pillows behind her and quite disregarding the fact that a cool sunrise wind was blowing against her flimsily clad figure. Her soul had come back with a violent spasm, like a rush of blood to her head, and her whole nature seemed to pour itself out towards the reddish light on that tall column. Her pulse of happiness was intense. What she experienced was like a quivering love-ecstasy that had no human object. She could actually feel the small round breasts under her night-gown shiver and distend. Her head instinctively fell back a little, while her chin was lifted up. Her lips parted, and a smile that was a smile of indescribable peace flickered over her face. She would have served at that moinent as a model for some primitive Flemish artist painting a passionately concentrated vision of the rape of Danae.

Whatever it was that stirred her so, the effect of it soon passed; but Mary told no one, not even John, of the experience she had had on the dawn of the Baptist's day. The invisible Watchers however of human life in Glastonbury noted well this event. “She has been allowed to see It,” they said to one another. “Will she be the only one among all these people?”

When two o'clock struck in the belfries and towers of the town there was an expectant stir amid the great company of spectators in the wide sloping field at the foot of the Tor. A surprising number of seats and wooden benches had been procured for the Mayor's great occasion, and upon these seats sat a vast crowd of people, all of them roused at that moment to a pitch of excitement such as had not been experienced in that place since the day when the last Abbot of Glastonbury had met his doom. Like the famous Homeric wind sweeping over a cornfield, this cumulative wave of crowd-hypnosis shivered through these assembled people, straightening their shoulders, lifting their heads, turning their faces towards the grassy terrace on the slope above them. Had Philip Crow's airplane been flying low down then, over this tightly packed crowd who had seats to sit upon and over the equally large crowd at the back of item and at their flanks who had no seats except the grass, it would have been of fascinating interest to note the varieties of human types gathered so close together. Many o£ those without seats lay sideways on the sward, or sat crouched and hugging their knees, while behind them all, drifting about or standing still, as their vagrant mood dictated, were large stray groups of what might be termed casual transients. Gipsies from the caravans ranged in rows along the hedge, nut-vendors, pedlars with their trays, hawkers with packs strapped to their backs, beggars, tramps, groups of astonished and cautious shepherds from the h;^: Mendips, stray factory-hands from Wookey and Street and the jUv -f Wells, all these, mingled with a number of strikers from the D\e-\York* of the town itself, kept circulating and surging, advaridas and retreating, jostling, edging, dodging, hovering. ?p\i;;^. ni-x-kins. criticising, deriding, applauding, just as the wind of accident and the beckoning of caprice carried them here or there.

The two front rows of seats had been reserved for local magnates, and in spite of all the suspicion, jealousy, distiusl. that was about, these seats had very few empty spaces. Miss Elizabeth Crow was there with Lady Rachel. Mrs. Philip Crow oizsht to have been there, for although Philip had taken the opportunitv of flying to Wookey Hole, his wife, under the influence of Emma who was here with Louie and Lily, had decided not to miss what she now spoke of as “something to rest a person's mind.*5 But Tilly's dislike of publicity was so great that she had refused this place of honour and had had to be ensconced in the fourth row. On the other side of Lady Rachel, however, there was an empty chair, for the girl had done all she could to persuade her father to come and there was still a good chance that he might. Ned Athling, who had written a considerable portion of the words of the whole performance, was one of the principal play-actors. Miss Bibby Fell was duly seated by Dr. Fell's side and next to her were Lawyer Beere and Angela, and beyond them Miss Drew and Mary. By Mary's side John had found a place for a foreign priest. In the central portion of the second row of seats, behind these personages, were the Vicar and his son, for though Sam had steadily refused to have anything to do with the performance and was now reduced to agitated burnings of heart by the presence of Nell, he had been unwilling to refuse his father when Mat had made an especial appeal to him not to desert him on this occasion. Next to Mat and Sam sat Mr. Wollop and in company with Mr. Wollop almost the whole staff of Wol-lop's shop. Being a bachelor, and also having an equal and unfailing interest in all mundane spectacles, Mr. Wollop had felt it incumbent upon him to be found on this occasion ”holding up,“ as he called it, ”his proper end."

It was a sign of something really grandly democratic in the soul of Glastonbury's leading tradesman that there never entered his head for a single second a doubt about the staff of Wollop's —all its “y°unS ladies” and all its “y°un© gentlemen”—being worthy of the second row of the select seats. It had, however, several times already entered the head of the Nietzschean young man—whose name was Booty—that he was in a place of embarrassing honour, since just in front of him was the vacant chair reserved for the Marquis and to his right, for he was at the end of the row of his fellows, sat Mr. Stilly of the bank.

In the third row of seats, but some distance from Sam, indeed just behind Mr. Stilly's aged parents, were none others than Will Zoyland and Nell. Nell had her brother Dave on her right, and beyond Dave sat the Vicar of St. Benignus, the eloquent Dr. Sodbury, whose ministrations were so pleasing to Megan Geard. Persephone Spear had been enrolled rather late in the proceedings among the players, but though so late a comer, she had been given a role second to< none, having been called upon to play the part of the Virgin Mother.

It was only in the fourth row, just behind Will and Nell Zoyland that seats had been reserved for the family of the Mayor. Here Mrs. Geard sat, between Cordelia and Mr. Bishop, the Town Clerk, for Crummie was to take the important role of the Lady of Shalott in the Arthurian part of the Pageant. Next to the Town Clerk sat Mrs. Philip, and by Mrs. Philip's side was the Curator of the Glastonbury Museum.

The fifth row of these reserved seats had been dedicated—Mr. Tom Barter had been careful to see to this—to the servants of the leading families of the town and all their especial friends and relations. In this row, therefore, there sat a most motley collection of persons, sweet-natured young girls, hypercritical spinsters, nervous old men, complacent old women, and a great many very riotous children. Here were Emma Sly, Louie and Lily Rogers, Sally Jones and her friend Tossie Stickles—this latter, because of her delicate state of health, armed with her mistress's , oldest and largest scent-bottle—Miss Bibby's latest two servants. Rose Nicker and Edith Bates, both of whom had twice over “given notice,” those formidable connoisseurs of mortal life, Mr. Weatherwax and Penny Pitches, those garrulous supporters of the dignity of the church, Mrs. R:>bHnso:* and Grandmother Cole, together with the whole robber band from ibj die\. Jackie. Nelly Morgan, Sis and Bert—the last-named being planted bv a devilish trick of chance just behind the curator of the museum whose devotion to fossils was only rivalled by his maniacal hatred of children.

At the extreme end of the sixth row, flanked by a voluble contingent of Germans from Bremen and Liibeck. sat Mother Lesrce with her faithful bodyguard, Young Tewsy, by her side, the old lady in her best black silk and the old man in a suit of cast-off broadcloth, hired from the laundryman, and formerly belonging to a Baptist minister. On the other side of Mrs. Legge sat Blackie Morgan, between whom and the old procuress a curious and quite unprofessional friendship had sprung up.

Mr. Geard had surprised both John and Barter by insisting on remaining completely independent of the whole thing—independent of the actors, independent of the spectators—and the only indication he had given to his family of his present whereabouts was a word he had casually dropped after their early dinner about seeing how the performance looked from the top of the Tor!

The number of foreigners who were present surpassed even John's expectation and they constantly increased. Crowds of them kept entering the field long after the performance had commenced. Every train that arrived brought more of them. They were French, German, Spanish, Bohemian, Dutch, Danish, Scandinavian and Russian. There were even two oriental, long-haired monks from a monastery in the Caucasus. John Crow imagined these two men setting out on this westward instead of eastward pilgrimage at the very first hearing of its possibility, when two and a half months ago he had s?nt his announcements across Europe.

The only person among all this immense crowd who had bothered about trying to get into personal relations wTith the organisers of the event was a mysterious-looking priest from Constantinople who called himself Father Paleologue. It was this man to whom John—when he found that he could speak English —had given a place by Mary's side, in the front seats. At the opposite end of the sixth row from where Mrs. Legge ani Blackie were seated were Old Jones and Abel Twig. The Ward Matron who had brought them—a handsome buxom woman always spoken of as Aunt Laura—was doing her best to amuse the two old men. In this task she was not assisted very much by her neighbour on the other side, who was an exceedingly caustic French journalist famous for his biting wit. This man, who had come to Glastonbury solely to report on the doings of Paul Capporelli, was alternately scribbling in a notebook what presumedly were light touches of local colour, suitable as a background for the great clown, and stretching his neck to catch more of the profile of Lady Rachel. Every now and then he would turn a ferocious stare upon Abel Twig, who was seated between Aunt Laura and Old Jones. There was something about Number One's physiognomy, not to speak of his Sedgemoor dialect, which this critical Parisian found peculiarly irritating. He was trying to catch stray sentences—characteristic of English phlegm and English snobbishness—from the “aristocracy” in the front rows, among whom rumour had informed him was sitting the daughter of Lord P., who represented one of the oldest Mar-quisates in the Kingdom, but Number One's expressions of wonder as to what had become of “thik big flock of good South-Downs what old man Chinnock used to turn into this here field,” ivere spoken so loudly that it was hard to hear anything else.

If the critic from Paris had desired to put down in his little book a really significant trait of the English character, he would have noted how respectfully and tactfully the brigade of Taunton constables called in by Philip kept themselves in the background. It was natural enough perhaps that the police-sergeant responsible for this large body of tactful officers had chosen to confine their activity that afternoon to the outskirts of the crowd in the Tor Field, but such strategy unfortunately played into the hands of the really formidable trouble-makers. These were the revolutionary leaders of the strikers at the Dye-Works. Led by Red Robinson, who since his rebuff on Easter Monday, had deserted the primrose-path for blood-and-iron politics, the Dye-Works strikers with as many adherents as they could collect from the Wookey and Wells workshops were even now at this very moment parading the streets with revolutionary banners. By means of a real inspiration of the genius of “% ”ate.“” Red had made a bid for the Nonconformist element among the populace of Glastonbury and side by side with his political insignia he had caused to be displayed at the head of his rapidly growing procession inscriptions denouncing the Mayor's Pageant. “Down with Medievalism,” these crafty scrolls read. “Down with Superstition,” “No Lourdes, no Lisieux Here,5” “Down with Religious Mummery.”

Thus while Philip's police force was protecting the morals of Glastonbury from the dangerous pieties of its Mayor, these street-rioters were lumping both capitalist and pietist together as joint-enemies of the people. Up and down the streets tossed and swayed these varied and singular ensigns, gathering numbers as they went and collecting in their train all the roughest elements of the town. At last the cry arose—inspired by the -Solus-breath of Red's genius for action—“To the field!”* and the whole turbulent tide of people, the actual strikers far outnumbered by the less orderly elements, began pouring down Chilk-well Street towards the scene of the performance. It soon began to spread, as Lily would put it, “like wildfire,” or as Penny would put it, “like Satan's own stink,'” through the poorer portions of the place that “The Town was up.”"