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TKe moment finally came when John decided that he would arouse his prostrate companion. This was a new delight: for. as he knew by experience, a girl is never so provocative as ^\hen she wakes up from a long trance of passivity during which her whole being has been charged to overflowing by the electricity of desire.

He jumped quickly to his feet. “Up with you, my treasure,'” he cried. “I'm getting restless.” Nothing, not a shade, not a flicker, not a glow, not a breath, did he miss of the girl's identity, as he helped her to get upon her feet. Her benumbed, half-unconscious shyness—for she swayed like a drugged creature when first she found herself erect—the way her cheeks smelt of sunshine and moss, the way her lips tasted of the stalks of grass, the way she glanced, with an indrawn “chut-chut” of tongue and teeth, at the untidy state of her dress, the way she half-yawned and half-smiled, all these things doubled the enchantment w*ith which he now embraced her, turning her this way and that, as he pretended to brush the hedge-rubble from her clothes.

The very fact that she was such a grave, self-contained and dignified girl made all her little feminine peculiarities much sweeter to him. Mary indeed had got in John what women so rarely get, a lover who was as conscious as another girl would have been, only actively instead of passively so, of the thousand and one little infinitesimal flickerings of physical feeling which create the aura in which the mind functions.

“John!”

“Yes, Mary?”

“I believe it would have been easier, after all, if we'd done the natural and obvious thing and gone straight to the room after we were married.”

“Now don't fuss over that, any more,” he retorted, picking up her hat for her. “It was to please her we did as we did. It was her idea-She begged you to wait till Sunday and we promised we would* Nobody knows we're married but her and Tom and Dekker.”

“Perhaps . . . FU have ... to wait . . . till Sunday,” said Mary.

John looked so aghast at this that she kissed him of her own accord.

.“Well . . . FI1 do my best. But how shall I let you know whether to come and meet me at the gate or not?” she continued rather wistfully. “She may make such a scene, when it comes to the point, that Fll have to put it off till tomorrow.”

“Oh, Fll come at nine, my treasure, and hang about there for half an hour, for an hour if you like! And then, if you're not out before St. John's strikes ten, Fll know you can't do it. But you will do it—if the woman hasn't fallen into a fit or anything—you will, won't you?”

"I will? said Mary solemnly; and she felt if she were making a vow before that whole, sacred, golden cornfield.

“We ought to have done it as I wanted,” he grumbled now, picking up his stick and his own hat. “We ought to have done it directly after the Pageant.”

“Now stop!” the girl cried with a flushed cheek. “I absolutely refuse to go over all that again. You know perfectly well why I wouldn't do it then. You know how mixed up everything was and how—but, oh, my dear, don't let's quarrel over that old story now! Fm too happy today. It's all been too lovely today. Don't let's go and spoil it now, just at the end. My dearest, my dearest, don't 'ee bring up those old grievances now, please, don't 'ee!” And she slipped her hand into his with a gesture of intense pleading.

John shrugged his lean shoulders with a gesture learnt in France; but he obeyed her and let the dangerous topic drop.

Hand in hand they soon recovered their equanimity as they moved along the hedge towards the gate leading into Bulwark's Lane.

John never took Mary's hand without a dim, delicious feeling that he was holding her—as he never yet had held her—undressed and lying by his side.

“Well,” he thought, “tonight . . . tonight!” and then as he lifted up the heavy gate to close it, when they were safe in the lane, and took a final glance at that shimmering corn, “I must never forget this afternoon; never, never!” Slowly, lingeringly, they drifted down the uneven decline, following the windings of that narrow lane, and he held her fingers tighter and tighter in his clasp. Why, oh, why, had he not kept her there in the cornfield till it was too late for her to go back to the Abbey House; till there was nothing to be done but just let Miss Drew go, and lock themselves into their Northload room for the night!

But it was wiser, always wiser, to accept the appointed end of happy hours! His incorrigible mind set itself wondering now wThether this might not be the real solution of the problem of evil, of pain, of deprivation and frustration in the world. Suppose things were so made that there was nothing in life that need interrupt an eternity of August afternoons like this one? Would that not take away from this afternoon its perfect thrill, its wonderful essence, its strange and abiding entelechy?

Though he hadn't thought of such matters up there, wasn't it the awareness, at the back of his mind, of his noisy shanty in the Great Western yard, of old Tom's cynical troubles, of Miss Drew's tragic passion, of Geard's mania about Chalice Well, of Philip's scornful hostility, of the difficulty of propitiating their landlady, of the way Mad Bet was forever waylaying him, yes! and of the sights and sounds, so many of them disagreeable, that crowded in on his days, as he went back and forth between Northload Street and the railway station, which, like the solid masonry of the bulk of St. John's Tower, making its rich turrets and pinnacles so much the lovelier, had given the final magic touch to those golden wheat-stalks and those black stockings?

John dug his root-handled hazel-stick viciously into the dry cart-ruts as this thought came to him.

“My sweet!” he cried aloud.

“What is it, John?”

“Do you suppose all our happiness depends on contrast?”

“You mean our having to come down here; and my having to go back for dinner?”

“That kind of thing . . . yes!”

“Better walk alone now,” she said, drawing her hand away and moving it quickly to her hat and then to her waistband. “I know what you mean, John, and I've thought of that toor—but sometimes I get a feeling that there's a world, just inside or just outside this world, where these opposites that are so hard to understand, lose their difference altogether.”

“But that means death, doesn't it?”

She turned her heads towards him and he was astonished at the softness, the bloom, the glow that suffused her face at that moment.

“Not * . . necessarily . . . not always,” she said slowly; and then, before turning her head away, she smiled one of those deep, mysterious, feminine smiles, that only the greatest poets and artists, such as Dante, Leonardo, Blake, have dared to note, depict and comment on, in their troubled search for the absolute.

St. John's clock struck six as they reached the centre of the town. “Too late for tea, John,” she said. And then she added, “We'll have our tea at midnight and all to ourselves. But, oh, goodness! I do feel so frightened all of a sudden.”

“What's the matter, sweetheart?”

“Oh, I don't know! John, I'm afraid, she'll be terribly upset. You won't be angry if I don't come, and you've waited and waited?”

“Of course not,” he replied hurriedly, “By God, it'll only be what I deserve if I have to come back alone. Besides, it's only putting it off till tomorrow!”

The girl stared in front of her, fixing her eyes on that well-preserved Gothic building that is usually called the Abbot's Tribunal. Something had profoundly disturbed her.

“Tomorrow . . . tomorrow,” she murmured vaguely.

“What is it, my sweet? What is it, Mary?”

She gave a quick sigh and a shake of her head.

"Oh, nothing ... I expect I'm just nervous. But when you've

looked forward to a thing for a very long time and it's just------"

She bit her lower lip; she pushed back the hair beneath her hat with the unconscious gesture of a woman facing the worst tidily. “Well, my dear,” she said resolutely, fighting down a craving to burst into tears and to cry frantically: “Let's go to the room now, straight away, quick—to the room—now!” “Well, my dear, I suppose we'd better part here. I'll just have a comfortable time to see her for a moment or two before we dress for dinner.”

“Will you come over ... to the room ... in your—dress ??” John asked, feeling as if he were a tramp making a rendezvous with a princess.

“Of course; I've got my warm cloak, haven't I? Til bring my little black bag.”

John looked at her with astonishment. That she should be able—this delicate exquisite provoker of feelings such as could ascend the steps of the ultimate Heaven—to manage such a drastic undertaking as to have a scene with Miss Drew and leave the house with a black bag, seemed to him wonderful. That she was ready to do it, that she was fond of him enough to do it, amazed him. He had never been a man who attracted women, and he exaggerated their coldness towards him. Indeed in regard to the love of women he had a physical humility that wTas almost a mania. One of the strongest holds that Mary had over him was the simple fact that she, a sweet-looking, intellectual girl, could be in love with him at all! Secretly John regarded himself as the most unlovable human creature then living in Glastonbury.

As he continued to hold the hand which she had given him and to stare at her like a person in a trance, Mary had herself to make the move she dreaded.

“Good-bye . . . till tonight!” she said and tore her hand away. But she was back again before John had left the spot. It was a crowded piece of pavement where they had stopped in front of the mullioned windows of the old Tribunal, and John, following the cream-coloured frock with his eyes, had stepped into the gutter so as not to be jostled.

Here they met as she pushed her way back against the current of the crowd.

“If I don't come tonight, I'll come tomorrow morning. You won't go out till I come, will you?”

“I should say not!”

And she had flown for the second time.

She still had that queer disturbed feeling, as coming down Silver Street, she passed the high Vicarage wall. “It looks like a monastery!” she thought. She was anything but reassured when she caught sight of Sam Dekker at the Vicarage gate, talking to Crummief Geard. Crummie had recently taken to helping old Mrs. Robinson arrange the flowers for the church altar, and she had come—quite naturally that Saturday night—to fetch a bunch of white geraniums from the Vicarage garden.

Sam raised his hat as Mary passed and Crummie nodded; but the impression left by this encounter was an unpleasant one.

“She holds those white flowers like a nun,” Mary thought. “And she used to be such a lovely, merry creature. I believe that man is putting horrible ideas into her head! He's got a sort of furtive inquisitor's look. He'll be making that pretty little thing enter some terrible Order. How she is listening to him, drinking in every word! He's worse than a priest—that young man. And what a shifty sensual look he's got. He gave me a look as much as to say: 'Go on and take your pleasure! Go on and break Miss Drew's heart! A time will soon come when you too will come here for white geraniums!'”

As Mary hurriedly slipt off her cream-coloured frock—and she felt a desire to crumple that dress between her hands and press it to her face instead of folding it up so carefully—and began taking down her hair, she became conscious that her panic just now went deeper than the struggle with poor Miss Drew and deeper even than the difference between the Tribunal and that golden field. She paused in her task, with her bare arms lifted to her head at the mirror, and stared into her own grey eyes. Mary was as little conceited of her looks (nor, to confess the truth, were they of any startling quality) as her lover-cousin, for he could hardly be called a husband yet. with those bridal sheets still cold, was conceited of his.

Into her grey eyes she looked therefore, as a spirit might look that would fain give pleasure to the man she loved by giving him her body. “The next time,” she thought, “I look in the glass will be in our room!” She took the comb now and began combing out her hair, holding her head so far back that she made her long tresses hang straight as seaweed, clinging to a smooth-oval-shaped stone. And she really did forget her anxiety now and Miss Drew and everything; for the electricity in her hair, as she pulled the comb through it, gave her such a delicate, amorous shiver that it made her feel as if butterfly wings were caressing her nipples under her soft shift

And she thought: "What ivill it be like tonight? Shall 1 feel awkward and ashamed? Will I be able to sleep?*'

There came a puckered wrinkle to her forehead now, as she put the comb down and began plaiting her smoothed-out locks. John was funny. John's manias and fastidiousnesses, where girls were concerned, seemed to be endless. 'Til be a fool, an idiotic fool, if I let him see me undressed too soon. I'd better put out the lights while Fm slipping on my nightgown,"

Her mind pondered on gravely and intently, thinking to herself, “Well—there you are again, you curious creature!” It was indeed a fierce mania of Mary's to stare into her own eyes at the looking-glass. She did it as a rule more angrily than with any other feeling; and, when she did it, she always thought of the self that looked back at her there as something quite different from the self she was conscious of really being. Her real self didn't seem to have eyes at all; didn't, in some mysterious way, seem to need eyes or nose, or mouth! Her real self seemed compounded out of pure ether and totally independent of bodily form.

“I've felt this unsafe feeling somewhere else,” she now told her staring grey eyes; “and I know where it was too! It was the night when I undressed after being in the boat with John, on the Wissey; the night when I was in the room next to Dave and Persephone, and wThen John was at that inn.”

What Mary could not know was that the original cause of this feeling was that the desperate prayer which they had sent up from the boat that day had only reached the malice in the First Cause instead of its beneficence. She tried angrily now to shake off the feeling.

“If I do make Miss Drew let me go tonight,” she thought, “I'll have it out with you, looking so wild and troubled!'5 And then, not thinking of herself as beautiful, she set herself to think of the best method of procedure when the great moment came. No young lady from Wollop's, led by Young Tewsy into ”my other house,“ could have meditated more carefully on the diplomacy of provocation. But this grave, true-hearted girl, before she had finished arranging her hair as she wished it to be, had smiled once at her own image. It was a flurried, faint, flickering smile, like a watery sun on vaporous ice; but, when she came to kneel before her chest of drawers to take out her best white evening dress—that she had not put on since the night when Tom Barter came—she suddenly fell to laughing aloud. The memory had come into her head of those everlasting Elizabethan bawdy jests about the taking of maidenheads. ”I don't fancy I'll be much changed in that respect" she thought to herself, as she unfolded her big crimson sash.