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“Haven't you noticed, Cordy, that it's often some small insignificant place like this that comes back to your mind with a sudden significance, rather than the more famous spots?”

She was not yet so used to being called “Cordy” by Mr. Evans that it did not strike her as queer to hear it now as they made their way up this nameless and rainswept liule eminence. Names are like clothes to girls. The name Cordelia, especially when uttered by her father, always made her feel as if she were wearing her old, weather-worn tailor-made costume, and beneath it, her winter underwear against her skin; whereas when she heard Mr. Evans call her 4wCordy'“ she felt as if she were wearing her thinnest cotton drawers. Since she had been married she had been ”Cordy" almost constantly in spite of the fact that she was now wearing her winter clothes.

Like a tree that had begun to gather moss and lichen before it was old, there was so much untouched soil in the rich levels of this girl's nature that the green sprouts of passion grew moTe lavish and luxuriant every day.

Between the Glastonbury trees stripping themselves bare and this Glastonbury native, stripping herself day by day of new maidenly reserves for the enchantment of her lover there was a similar parallel. It was to the west wind that the Glastonbury foliage yielded and fell; and it was to the gusty intermittent motions of Mr. Evans' erratic desires that Cordy's innate chastity sank away. Not one aspect of her life under those new brick tiles of her little house, fresh from the local brickyard to the north of Bove Town, where the council had bought them, but became associated with her gradual seduction.

The fact that the Welshman cared little for womanly beauty, the fact that behind the concentration of his desire was nothing but the diffused sublimation of his suppressed vice, rendered this girl's initiation into the nervous excitements of Eros an arena of hidden rapture such as, at that epoch, contained no equal within the purlieus of the whole town.

The two descendants of the House of Rhys were now halfway up the ascent of their hill, their boots and stockings already thoroughly soaked by the wet stalks of the dead bracken. The slope they were ascending was to the northward of West Pen-nard, whose outskirts in following their winding cattle-path they had already passed. Between the summit of this hill topped by the clump of dwarf spTuce firs and by the ruined sheepfold, and the banks of Whitelake River there was nothing but the rough tract of untilled country known as Hearty Moor.

It was thus as unfrequented a spot as could well be found within a few miles of Glastonbury; and had a circle been drawn about that town no point upon its circumference save perhaps Crannel Moor to the west of Godney, would have been securer against human invasion. Save for an occasional shepherd-boy, guarding a flock of black-faced ewes from Norwood Farm, no one, even in summer, ever came to this place.

Thus when Mr. Evans suddenly cried out:

“There's a light in the sheepfold, Cordy!” his voice was as startled as if he had informed her of the presence of a gibbet up there with a figure swinging from it! A steadily burning light, when you are convinced of being several miles from any human habitation, is a thing that naturally makes a person's pulses beat.

“Is it the Norwood shepherd?” panted Cordelia, trying to keep pace with her companion's long strides.

“Hush!” was Mr. Evans5 reply as he quickened his pace still more.

She followed him in silence; and together they pressed forward, ascending the hill. The wind struck them with such force as they climbed and the darkness had gathered about them there so suddenly that Cordelia began to experience that natural human nervousness which the approach to> a flickering light in a lonely spot can induce even in one not usually subject to common timidities.

She whispered something in her companion's ear that the wind rendered inaudible.

“Hush!” replied Mr. Evans again.

It now became apparent that the light they had seen was brighter than any conceivable shepherd's lantern from Norwood Farm. Cordelia could not resist disobeying him; and for the third time during their approach she spoke.

“Someone's lighted a fire,” she whispered. “The ghost of Lancelot!” she added with a wild laugh. Her words and her unrestrained laugh seized upon one portion of Mr. Evans' consciousness and carried it, like a wild goose with ruffled, helpless feathers, to a certain imaginary tract in an ancient dream-landscape of his, where he always placed this ruined chantry from the old legend, surrounding it with the melancholy horses—their long uncut manes full of dead leaves and their burdock-tangled tails sweeping the wet grass—growing older and feebler year after year, as their maslers prayed, hoping against hope, the armourless penitents within those stone walls and the armourless steeds without, for the return of the lost King:.

It was fortunate for the silence of their approach, as they now, having reached the summit of the little hill, stealthily pushed their way through the spruce clump, that the wind, blowing obliquely across their profiles, carried that hysteric laugh of Cordelia's over the darkened valley towards Laverly and Pilton and Folly Wood.

Mr. Evans possessed himself now of the girl's cold hand and as he drew her after him between the firs, led by that flickering firelight and by a smell of burning fir-cones that now accompanied it, he began to feel, rising up within him, a childish delight in adventure such as he thought his terrible obsession had destroyed forever.

They now heard voices within the walls of the stone sheepfold; and as step by step they cautiously advanced, anxious to get a glimpse of the speakers while they themselves remained unseen, they both recognised the harsh uplifted voice of Mad Bet. The other voice Mr. Evans did not know, though he could tell it was a man's; but Cordelia, being a native of the town, recognised quickly enough who was the madwoman's companion. It was the disreputable Finn Toller; and later, when in bed that same night she told Mr. Evans who it was, she received an obscure shock, like a premonitory warning, when her husband showed an unexpected interest in this sinister figure.

It was through a gap in the stone wall that they saw these two persons now, sitting beside that fire of sticks and dry ferns. They dared not move close enough to catch any definite words of what these two were saying; but the psychic aura of their discussion reached them; and it must have been this, though Cordelia did not suspect it then, that accounted for Mr. Evans' subsequent desire to make Codfin's icquaintance. Just as the gods are said to know one another under any mask so are those whose peculiar vice or perversion separates them from the rest of the world endowed with a sixth sense of recognition.

Retaining his bride's hand in his own, and growing conscious of some appeal to his perilous nerve in what was going on, Mr. Evans compelled her to remain concealed. Concealment was as unsuitable to Mr. Geard's elder daughter as any role he could have chosen for her; but she was too happy to be anything but docile; and with their faces brushed by a tall undergrowth of elders they contemplated through its broken wall that ruined sheepfold, whose masonry, at any rate, although not in its present form, had witnessed the death of the noblest of Glastonbury penitents.

The dialogue of which they caught only the psychic vibrations, for the two were speaking in low tones, was as follows: “If so be as thee can't do it to she, may-be thee could do it to he?”

These words of Mad Bet were a startling surprise to Mr. Toller, for he sat up straight on his log, close to the fire they were feeding, and stretched out his arms to the blaze, clasping and unclasping his fingers in its glowing heat so nervously as to make it obvious he was thinking of something very different from the physical pleasure of warmth. The man's straggly yellow beard wagged in the smoke of the crackling sticks as he turned his watery blue eyes towards his companion. He blinked miserably with his white eyelids beneath his hairless eyebrows and there came a look of panic and even horror into his face.

“But he be your true-love, baint he?” he said, with shocked emphasis and speaking very gravely. “Ye doesn't want me to likidate, as thik Mr. Robinson do call it, your wone true-love, Mad Bet?”

The woman was silent; and what the feelings were that seethed and fermented in her heart it would be hard to put down in words; but after a minute or twTo she spoke again.

“If he were dead, never would she sleep with he again in a pretty night-dress bought for a fairing from Tim Wollop.”

But the philosophy of the Glastonbury underworld could not let this idealism pass unchecked,

“But neither would you ever sleep long-side of he. Mad Bet. He would be lying in churchyard mould and ye would be valler-ing in top-room of old John Chinnock's.”

There was a long pause at this point during winch Finn Toller pensively stirred the fiery embers with one hand while he flung upon their exposed red heart a handful of dry wood with the other.

“Listen, Finn Toller!”

The smooth and freckled face of the workhouse waif composed itself to receive a painful shock of some kind. Never did Mad Bet open her lips, but she caused her devotee some kind of nervous agitation. But so far from decreasing her servitude this constant state of psychic fear in which she kept him accentuated his devotion. Fear of her kept him in a perpetual ferment of nervous idolatry.

“Listen, Finn Toller; and answer me careful, for I want to have the truth of this from thee. Will thik iron bar, what you knows of, make my young man feel afore he dies? I don't want 'un to feel. I'd be feeling it me wone self, if he had any anguish. I don't want 'un to be able to say as much as his patter-nost, as they papists call it. I want he to be alive, and thinking about bis bitchy; and the next tick of the clock I want he to be all blackness; blackness and holy bubbles and dear soul gone!”

Mad Bet was wearing a dark shawl over her poor bald pate; and, as she spoke, she pulled it down over her eyes, as if symbolising this final extinction of her “young man's” consciousness.

“And when 'tis all over,” she added from beneath this veil, “and he be safe buried in earth, hour by hour I'll go and sit on's sweet grave! She won't be there; for 'twill be in thik graveyard out in Wells New Road that they'll lay 'un; and that will be too far for she to wend—'cept on Sundays and Holy Days! But old Bet will take her meals there; and day and night keep guard; and that's because it's necessary for someone to drive the devils away; and that's because the devils always love a sweet corpse; and that's because sweet corpses same as his'n, always do smell as sweet as new-mown hay!”

Had Mr. Evans been near enough to see Finn Toller's face in that firelight he would have been reminded of a famous folklore professor, whose lectures at one time he used to attend. When some pupil would propound to him a question that was more audacious than behooved the subject, this good man would frown in blank, bewildered confusion and would open his mouth to its utmost stretch.

Thus did Finn Toller look when Mad Bet asked him whether her “young man” would “feel” anything when that iron bar crushed his skull.

“If he did feel it / should feel it, Finn Toller,” repeated that crouching figure, pulling her shawl so far down over her face that the syllables she emitted issued forth in a muffled tone.

Mr. Toller continued to survey this enveloped head. It was hard for him to tell whether the woman's eyes were scrutinising him closely from beneath it or whether they were blinded by the folds of the shawl. But he watched her intently; as a tame wolf might watch its robber master ere they rose to attack a caravanserai of travellers.

From Cordelia's post of observation the madwoman's head, illuminated by those red flames, resembled an old Bible picture of the Witch of Endor. Squatting there on the floor of that ruined chantry she might have been an image of Despair confronted by an image of Murder; the former being conscious of every implication of the deed they discussed, the latter wrapped in a dull, stupid, besotted daze of animal uneasiness.

Resting with their heads pressed against their protecting elder bush, both Mr. Evans and Cordelia experienced many queer sensations as the acrid-smelling smoke from this fire hit their nostrils. Beating down his darker feelings, Mr. Evans set himself to recall a certain melancholy passage in Malory, the words of which, from constant perusal, he could reproduce in their precise lilt. These, as the damp twigs flapped against his head, and the wind through the ruined walls made a dull moaning in his ears, he repeated under his breath:

" 'Then Sir Launcelot never after ate but little meat, ne drank, till he was dead. For then he sickened more and more, and dried and dwined away. For the Bishop nor none of his fellows might not make him to eat, and little he drank, that he was waxen by a cubit shorter than he was, that the people could not know him.

For evermore, day and night he prayed: but sometime he slumbered a broken sleep; ever he was grovelling on the tomb of King Arthur and Queen Guenever. So he foil sick and lay in his bed; and then he sent for the Bishop that there was hermit and all his true fellows. . . . “My fair lords,'' said Sir Launcelot, ”wit you well my careful body will into the earth, I have warning more than now I will say; therefore give me my rites“ . . . Then there was weeping and wringing of hands; and the greatest dole they made that ever made men.5 ”

But all the while he was repeating these rhythmical words with one portion of his mind and in this task using all the power of his memory, there flitted through the unrecording portion of his consciousness a vague awareness of something going on over that fire that stirred up his suppressed vice. Mr. Evans was clairvoyant in these things and though he did not hear those murderous words spoken, the impression produced on the surrounding air by the mention of Finn Toller's iron bar was so strong that it roused emotions in him that he had not felt since the Pageant. And while Mr. Evans was struggling to drive back his devil by recalling the death of Lancelot, his bride's attention was hypnotised by the extraordinary figure of Mad Bet; and she kept saying to herself: