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Having uttered this diplomatic ultimatum, the old man, leaving behind him in Lady Rachel's nostrils a mingled Qdour of sweat and fish-slime, shuffled down the bridge steps muttering: “God-den, gentles, god-den, Lidy!”

Philip could not help following him with a wistful glance as he went off towards Mr, Twig's hut; for he thought to himself— “She will like to see that fish!”

The group of persons at Cold Harbour Bridge now began hurriedly to escape from one another; Sam and Jimmy Rake following in the track of Young Tewsy towards the Godney Road, Lady Rachel and Ned turning to their right and pursuing the tributary of the Brue that led to Northload Bridge and the centre of the town.

The great goddess chance, still finding her line of least resistance in the smooth fate-grooves of Glastonbury, now decreed that, as the two lovers passed Number Two's shop they should catch sight of Mr. Evans and old Bartholomew Jones talking in its interior with the door wide open.

Mr. Jones had left the hospital; but finding that his business had increased considerably, owing to the town's curiosity—especially the town's feminine curiosity—with regard to the eccentric Welshman, he had begun to negotiate with Mr. Evans, a slow and infinitely cautious proceeding on the old man's part, on the subject of some sort of partnership. Rachel caught Mr. Evans' eye as they passed and the lovers drifted into the shop.

Ned Athling, his temper now quite recovered, had been discussing with Rachel as they came along the possibility of making this capture of the famous chub of Lydford the subject of his first article for The Wayfarer.

Old Jones bowed himself off on the appearance of the two young people; for he said in his sly old heart, “Me pardner will be sprightlier in coaxin' they to buy summat if I baint there.”

Athling therefore lost no time in narrating to Mr. Evans the whole adventure of the fish; while Rachel, tired after their long stroll by the river, sank down to rest in one of the big Louis Quatorze chairs. The girl had noticed before that some of her happiest moments came to her when she was feeling exhausted like this. She had noticed it especially since she had come to Glastonbury. She had even spoken of it to Ned. “It's a delicious feeling,” she had told him. “It's just as if I sank down through some yielding element, into a world like this one; yes I in every particular like this one, only with all the annoying things left out.”

She took off her hat now and let it lie in her lap while she pushed back her brown curls from her forehead, glancing as she did so at one of Old Jones' gilt mirrors. “How white I am,” she thought, “and how hot and untidy and funny-looking! I wish I could get the smell of that old man's clothes out of my nose. How some smells do cling to anyone. And there's fish-blood on my hands too.” She lay back in the big gilt chair and crossed her legs, clutching the rim of her hat. Yes! It was coming, it was coming, that lovely sensation. It was like sinking through deep water, water of a pale glaucous colour, and seeing everything through water.

“Is that because Glastonbury was an island once?” she thought.

But how perfect it was to sit here, with the sounds of the street and the air-waves of misty sunshine coming in together through the open door! How handsome Ned looked talking to this man; and what passionate interest the man was taking in what he was telling him! But everything was so lovely and tender and wavering to her as she let her head sink back. “There's something heavenly,” she thought, “about this feeling. It's just like being dead and yet intensely happy. I've had it before, I think, in this shop. Certainly I had it the other day in the souvenir shop. It's something about this place. I don't know what it is. I'll tell Father I ivont go to London, whatever Aunt Betsy says!” The girl was right about Mr. Evans looking passionately interested. He looked as if he were plunged into some interior vision that rendered him totally unaware of what he was doing with his hands, or with his feet, or with his body. For instance, the moment Ned Athling had finished his narration Mr. Evans sank down on a small chair opposite Lady Rachel and stretched out his long legs with their great square-toed boots and grey socks and allowed his long arms to hang down on each side of the chair. His shirt, as well as his coat, was so much too short for him that not only were his bony wrists but perceptible portions of his lean arms nakedly visible to view, as his hands swung there with the long fingers dangling.

Lady Rachel was unable to resist a slight flicker of retreat from the presence of these great boots and rumpled grey socks thus protruded towards her; but being the well-bred girl she was, she restrained this movement at once and did not even draw in her own slender legs. Thus between the boot-soles of Rachel and the boot-soles of Mr. Evans there was not space to drop a feather.

Athling approached the back of his lady's chair and leaned^ both his elbows upon it so that his knuckles almost touched her head. Thus as Mr. Evans began his commentary upon what he had just heard there was no more distance between the lovers than there was between Mr. Evans and Lady Rachel and the magnetism that accompanied the Welshman's words linked them all three for a space together.

The extraordinary thing about Mr. Evans' face this afternoon, as the lovers watched it, was the rapidity of its changes from a mask of hollow, expressionless desolation into lineaments of prophetic and inspired passion.

“I never thought I would be here ... in this Death-Island of my people ... for Glastonbury is the Gwlad-yr-Hav, the Ely-sian Death-Fields of the Cymric tribes ... on the day when that fish was killed. Of course I knew about it. Friends of mine, when I was at Jesus, went down to Lydford to see it. They never did see it themselves; but they talked to old men and old women who had. It must be fabulously old, that fish! Tewsy ought never to have done it; but if anyone was to do it he was the one. Of course he won't live the year out. But he'll have the happiest year he's ever had in his life; and he'll probably die in his sleep. What I am now telling you two . . . and you can believe I would not tell everyone these things ... is mostly from the Book of Taliessin and from the Triads and from David ap Gwilym and from Lady Charlotte's Mabinogion and from Sir John Rhys, and from the Red Book of Hergest, and from the Vita Gildae and from the Black Book of Carmarthen, but in my own Vita Merlini I've gone further than any of them into these things. Few Glastonbury people realise that they are actually living in yr Echwyd, the land of Annwn, the land of twilight and death, where the shores are of Mortuorum Mare, the Sea of the Departed. This place has always been set apart . . . from the earliest times . . . Urien the Mysterious, Avallach the Unknown, were Fisher Kings here . . . and for what did they fish? The Triads only dare to hint at these things ... the Englynion only to glance at them . . . Taliessin himself . . . did you know that? . . . was netted with the fish in the weir, by Elphin the son of Gwydno Garanhir . . . And for what . . . and for what did this Fisher King * . .”

Mr. Evans' voice now rose to a tremulous pitch of excitement. Ned Athling's hands crossing the back of Lady Rachel's gilded throne were now actually in contact with the girl's neck, nor did she move her head away. A mutual impulse made it seem desirable that they should touch each other at some point while Mr. Evans was talking about “yr Echwyd.”

“For what did these mystical Figures . . . rulers in Ynis-Witrin in the time of my people . . . seek . . . when they fished?” The curious thing was that Mr. Evans' body seemed at that moment, while his two young hearers watched him, to grow more and more corpse-like. Those bare hanging wrists, those outstretched feet in their great boots remained absolutely motionless. It was as if his physical form had already sunk into the waters of that Cimmerian sunset-realm which he called “yr Echwyd,” while some power from outside of him was making his lips move in his corpse-like face!

"They sought for more than a fish, for more than any great chub of Lydford . . .

the people before my people worshipped, when they set up-----*'

The voice proceeding from the lips of the corpse-face of Mr. Evans became so hoarse and broken at this point that it hardly seemed like a human voice. Lady Rachel could clearly hear the footsteps on the pavement outside, through the street door which they had left ajar; and these steps sounded to her like the steps of all the generations of men treading down the stammerings of the Inanimate Bottom of the World.

“NATURE SEEMS DEAD”

DURING THE FIRST WEEK IN DECEMBER THREE NEW SUBJECTS OF the King of England entered this world in the little maternity annex of the Glastonbury Hospital. Nell Zoyland was delivered of a boy, while Tossie Stickles—to her immense pride and satisfaction—was delivered of a pair of lusty girl twins. It was conducive of certain curious encounters that these two young women and their children should be lying simultaneously in private rooms opening from the same passage. Tom Barter coming to visit Tossie found himself confronted in that passage one day by Will Zoyland and another day by Sam Dekker, while Miss Elizabeth Crow, who was devoted in her watchfulness over Toss and her twins, met on one and the same evening, Persephone Spear and Dave Spear coming to see Nell, but coming separately on this errand.

Something certainly seemed—at least up to this present date which was now the tenth of December—to be favouring the commune conspirators. Dave and Red and their new ally Paul Trent had evidently been well advised in their choice of a locale that day, wherein to broach their daring plot. Philip Crow, like many another Napoleonic tactician, was weakest in the cautious consideration of all probable and improbable contingencies. Like the impetuous Corsican and like Oliver Cromwell he swept ahead upon his main idea, allowing sleeping dogs to sleep and open stable doors to remain open. Never for one second did it cross his active brain, any more than it crossed the brain of Tilly, absorbed in making her domestic arrangements foT the winter, or the brain of Mr. Tankerville, growing more and more energetic in his commercial flights about Europe, that there was the least chance of any difficulty over his factory leases, the rents of which remained still only paid up to the beginning of the New Year. The construction of his new road and his new bridge was for the moment held up by the flat refusal of Mr. Twig to sell any portion of his small patrimony, but the Evercreech man, more anxious than ever to serve this rich employer, since his father-in-law—as obstinate about dying as Number One was about selling— still persisted in milking his four Jersey cows with his own hand, was already in correspondence with the county officials over the possibility of exploiting a section of Lake Village Field. BuL though handicapped over his road and his bridge, Philip had begun his tin mining under the most promising conditions and already the sound of picks and mattocks and of cranes and engines could be heard proceeding from a big clearing in the hillside under which many unvisited subterranean passages led into the heart of the hill. Half a dozen truckloads of the precious metal had already been despatched from the railway station at Glastonbury; for although this station was further off than the one at Wells it was easier to make use of and Philip had a much stronger “pull” with the railroad officials there. It had been just a month ago, in the middle of November, when the first tin had begun to emerge, nor would Philip ever forget his feelings when he beheld the lorry containing it roll off towards the Great Western station, ready to be taken to Cardiff through the Severn Tunnel. For the last month the tin had been pouring forth with such a steady flow that Philip's spirits had mounted up to a pitch of excitement that was like a kind of diurnal drunkenness. He dreamed of tin every night. The metal in all its stages began to obsess him. He collected specimens of it, of every degree of weight, integrity, purity. He carried bits of it about with him in his pocket. All manner of quaint fancies—not so much imaginative ones as purely childish ones—connected with tin, kept entering and leaving his mind, and he began to feel as if a portion of his innermost being were the actual magnet that drew this long-neglected element out of abysses of prehistoric darkness into the light of day*

Philip got into the habit of walking every day up the steep overgrown hillside above Wookey and posting himself in the heart of a small grove of Scotch firs from which he could observe, without anyone detecting his presence, the lively transactions at the mouth of the big orifice in the earth, where the trees had been cut away and where the cranes and pulleys stood out in such startling relief against the ancient sepia-coloured clumps of hazel and sycamore, still growing around them upon the leafy slopes. Here he would devour the spectacle of all this activity he had set in motion, until he longed to share die physical exertions of every one of his labourers, diggers, machinists, truckmen, carters, stokers, miners, and haulers. He yearned to be himself boring, dynamiting, shovelling, lifting, carrying, driving: and so intensely had he fixed his eyes on every bodily movement these men had made, that by this time—by the tenth of December—he really could have hired himself out, and won commendation from his foreman in the job, at almost everyone of these several labours. It must not be supposed that he neglected his office-work or his dye works extensions and increasing European sales during these exciting weeks. He worked steadily at the office from nine to one every day, and always looked in there again about five before he went home to tea. After his tea he had recently acquired the custom of retiring to a room which Emma called the study, Tilly the north room and he himself the play-room. Shut up in this room he used to ponder long and deeply over his affairs, plunging into various mathematical and commercial calculations and making rapid notes in a big, foolscap-size notebook with a white vellum binding. This notebook had been given to him by Persephone when she was quite a little girl. Illuminated upon its front page was his name and hers united by a gilt border within which were lilac-coloured hearts, strung upon a, green string.