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Paul Trent's coup d'etat in the matter of Lord P.'s property, his own eviction from his new dye works, a sudden deplorable diminishing of the expected tin ore from his Wookey Hole vein, all these blows, coming together, had driven this grandson of uthe Devereux woman" fairly to the wall.

“Ought to be there,” he thought bitterly, ''ought to be there, to help hoist this crazy charlatan, who's ruining me with Grandfather's money, upon the final pinnacle of his folly."

His tin was running out before either his new road or his new bridge was ready to transport it. The old dye works which was all that was left him of his special industry, taken over thirty years ago, was devoid of a manager*

Bob Tankerville, entangled with one of those servants of Miss Drew's, was not half the adventurous air-pilot he used to be. The airplane itself had become an impossible expense in the present state of his finances. He had come down finally in the last few days to endure some very humiliating discussions about his bank-loans with the Glastonbury bank-manager. Even the bank itself, flooded with communal money from the huge inrush of visitors, was beginning to turn against him! He had seen too with his own eyes a row of trucks full of his tin ore shunted on a siding to make room for the loads of clay which the council was bringing in as material for their preposterous figurines. And only a year ago, with Barter as his manager, he was in the full flush of his success! Yes, it was the treachery of that accursed Didlington cad that was at the bottom of his trouble! He had thought he was going to do better without him and he had done better without him at first. But that was before old Beere fell into his dotage and let this smart rascal Trent outwit him at every point.

“Emma thinks”—began the irrepressible Tilly again, and never had the Perfect Servant been consigned to so deep a pit as her master consigned her to now—“that you ought to stand up to that crowd at the opening and tell them what you feel about these fol-de-lols.”

He lifted up his face and tried to smile at his wife with his )ld tender, humorous, superior smile.

“They'd howl me down,” he muttered.

“Oh, no they wouldn't, Philip—Oh, no they wouldn't! Not one of them, as Emma says, can speak as well as you do*. Not one of them can------”

But there was a look upon Philip's face that she had never seen before, a dangerous, reckless, desperate look; and she began suddenly to feel that it was wiser, with a man who could look like that, not to dare him to do hard things.

Tilly subsided into silence; and stretching out her arm, with the tea-pot in her hand, re-filled her husband's cup. which he had mechanically held out to her. She was worried by a little conspiracy of her own at that moment, for the success of which she wanted Philip out of the way that morning. Completely unknown to him, she and Emma had been visiting Jenny Morgan, or Blackie, as Red Robinson called her.

This had been Tilly's own immediate reaction to the disclosure Emma had at last consented to make to her, pushed on by the chattering tongues of the servants from the Abbey House. Even Emma—who thought she knew her mistress well—was surprised by the spirit which the little lady showed under this communication; and thus it was proved—to the astonished interest of the Invisible Naturalists—that the human minnow of the species “Housewife” is liable to act heroically at a great emotional crisis.

Tilly had indeed, in several trying and disconcerting interviews with her husband's ex-mistress, tried to persuade Blackie to give up the child and allow her formally to adopt it. But so far these attempts had proved fruitless.

Though Nelly Morgan went about during all her playtime, with Jackie and Sis and Bert, her mother seemed obstinately unwilling to part with a daughter she hardly ever saw. Since this particular morning however was, by reason of the opening of the arch, a general Glastonbury holiday, Tilly had induced the child to come up to The Elms after breakfast and pay her a formal visit. She had done this on the strength of an assurance from Philip that he would be away all day at Wookey; but she herself was begging him not to go to Wookey!

Tilly's interior nervousness grew so great at last that she felt she must get Philip off her hands, at least as far as that nondescript out-of-the-way room where he kept his geological specimens. But Philip had got up now from the table. He moved over to the fireplace and sat down in one of his grandfather's chairs and proceeded deliberately to light his pipe. Tilly pondered

How could she say to him, “I want to get rid of you so that I can welcome your girl's child!” It was one of those ironic private contingencies that some especially dedicated troop of imps seems to delight to contrive on occasions devoted to important public events.

Tilly thought to herself: “He's bound to hear the child's voice if he stays here. How crazy I was to let her come this morning!”

She began piling the breakfast things on a tray, a task which she delighted in—for if Tilly hadn't been a mistress she would have been a flawless parlour-maid—when there was a bold, loud ring at the front-door, a ring twice repeated, the ring of a child, who enjoys pulling the bell-iron out to its furthest reach! Well! there was nothing to be done. The fat was in the fire and the cat out of the bag.

She went herself to the door and opened it; and Philip, quick to catch something unusual in her manner, followed her into the hall. The worthy Emma, primary cause of this embarrassing contretemps, issued at the same second from the kitchen and advanced firmly, quietly, discreetly down the passage.

“Mummy were dead-asleep,” declared Nelly in her shrill child's voice. “So I thought I'd come in me week-day clothes. Mummy were turble sick last night.”

“Do you mean drunk?” growled Philip grossly, while Emma carefully shut the front door and began dusting with her apron the brass lion upon the hall-table; this last gesture being a symbol of the occasion's dramatic importance.

“Drunk-sick,” responded the child with a wicked gleam in her dark eyes. “Be you wanting to have me live here,” she added, turning to her sulky and disturbed father.

“Live here, child? I didn't know------” But he turned sharp round upon Emma, venting his discomfort upon the onlooker. “Don't stand there like that, woman!''' he snapped. ”We don't want any help with this child."

“You can clear away, Emma,” said Tilly apologetically, making a move to take the child into the drawing-room. But Emma, hurt to the quick, was already retreating towards the kitchen door, when she heard by the sounds behind her (for her ears were like the ears of a mouse in her own domain) exactly where her mistress was going. This knowledge brought her professional tact into play with an automatic force that overcame her injured feelings, for the new house-maid was cleaning the drawing-room and it would not do for her to notice things.

“Ethel is in there'm cleaning'm,” she said, indicating that the dining-room was the place for this domestic tragi-comedy.

“You shouldn't have spoken like that to Emma, Philip,” said Tilly, as soon as the faithful servant had withdrawn again.

“Damn Emma! Come in here, both of you,” and he pushed his wife and his child before him into the dining-room. “What I want to know first of all is this,” he began, when they were all inside; and he actually turned the lock of the door to make sure of no further invasion; “how long have you two been seeing each other?”

Tilly who had taken her usual place at the table was beginning to reply when the child cut her short. “Her's been seeing Mummy and me since Christmas. Her brought Mummy and me some crystal-ginger, didn't you, Marm? and some Reading biscuits, and some French sardines, and some Spanish olives, and some Turkish delight, and some tangerine oranges and some------”

“Here! hold up, kid!” cried Philip, unable to help smiling at this long enumeration of dainties. It crossed his mind how extraordinarily characteristic it was of Tilly to woo his mistress and his mistress' child with objects from the grocer's.

“I went once before Christmas,” said Tilly, who through this whole episode had preserved her equanimity perfectly except when Philip called Emma “woman.” “You've forgotten to tell him that, Nelly!”

“I always knowed,” cried the child in a shrill voice, when she interrupted herself by staring frantically at the little blue flame under Tilly's polished hot-water urn, and finally by stretching out a long thin arm towards this strange object, feeling with extended forefinger, to see if that queer flame was hot, “that father weren't me proper father, by mother pushing me away when her cried for he. Be lie my proper father?” and she sidled up close to Tilly in the most coaxing and ingratiating way, and pointed with her finger at Philip, who now stood with his back to the fire regarding the pair with a bemused scowl, Tilly put one hand round Nelly's waist and with the other began smoothing down the creases of her frock. “Yes, child,” she said hurriedly, “Fm afraid he is; though he hasn't been a very good father to you, not telling me about you long before this.” She kept her eyes on the child's dress and even began putting both hands to a place in the waistband that was held by a safety pin that had got loose.

“How could we know, kid, how could we know,” said Philip, addressing the child, “that she would have liked little girls who belong to robber bands and who trespass in Wick Woods and let rabbits out of snares?”

“She likes me!” said Nelly with decision and with one of her sudden impetuous movements she imprinted a quick, hot, excited kiss on Tilly's shoulder.

Tilly bent low down in her efforts to close the safety pin. She was extremely unwilling that Philip should detect that her eyes were swimming with tears. “She likes us both,” she said sharply and emphatically, “and she likes Emma too—don't you, Nelly?”

But Nelly had burst away from her hold and had rushed to the window. “There's a bicycle!” she cried, “and he's thrown a paper down! Oh, may I see if it's the Gazette? Mummy always lets me see the Gazette. It told about him and Mummy once! Mummy said that wicked Red put it in.” Without waiting for permission she ran out and brought the paper into the room. While she was gone Tilly and Philip exchanged a long, wordless look, that contained an exhaustive and conclusive commentary upon the whole episode*

He thought, “How ironical that both she and I were visiting Jenny in that house. Suppose we had met one day at the door!”

“May I open it?” asked.Morgan Nelly when she was back again.

“It'll be all over town that she's here now,” thought Philip. “That paper-boy will tell everyone.”

The Gazette contained prominent headlines about the opening of the arch. “Mayor's Speech Eagerly Awaited,” Philip could read, from where he stood by the fire. “Jackie's Sally be going to marry Red,” announced Morgan Nelly, finding no sign of the pictures she had hoped for in this number and offering her own quota of Glastonbury news. "Mummy says 'tis more than he deserves/1

She remained silent for a second, her brows puckered. ifcWhat do bewger mean?“ she suddenly enquired gravely of the man by the fire. She evidently felt that The Elms' dining-room was a source of supply for certain gaps in her knowledge of the world. ”Do bewger mean the Devil?"

But there was heard now a discreet little tap at the locked door, and Tilly sprang to her feet “I've got to order lunch/' she said. ”Shall we keep her here for the day?"

Philip nodded without speaking; and then as Tilly's hand was on the door handle, “I think perhaps I ivill go up there presently,” he said.

“To the opening?”

“Yes. That's what you said, wasn't it?” This appealing to her for advice on so momentous an occasion, on the question of his confronting in public his grand enemy, took the little lady's breath away.

He seemed different in some way as she looked at him now, standing over there; and for their mates to look different is extremely disconcerting to women. They prefer the most familiar tempers to anything inexplicable.

“I . . . wouldn't . . . care . . . to , . . interfere . . . with your . . . plans, Phil,” she stammered nervously. “But if you do go I must tell Emma lunch won't be till after two. The opening is announced to begin at eleven, you know; but it won't be over till after one, I'm sure.”

While this memorable encounter was taking place in The Elms' dining-room, for it was already long past ten, an enormous crowd had assembled at the foot of Chalice Hill, where, as the Western Gazette had justly remarked, the Mayor's speech was being “eagerly waited by all Wessex.”

It was not only the opening of the Saxon arch and of the Rotunda, but the inauguration of the new Glastonbury commune that this twentieth of January was to see; and the possibility of all manner of exciting clashes between those friendly to the Mayor and those hostile to him, gave the sort of spice to the occasion that always attracts a crowd.

Tom Barter had come across to Northload Street, puzzled as to what he and Tossie were to do that day with the twins, for Toss had left Benedict Street and had taken a furnished room of her own. Mary had made him stay and have a second breakfast with her; for she wanted to talk to him about Tossie and the children.

This other Mr. and Mrs. Crow were indeed as late that morning as the pair at The Elms. John lay in bed still, propped up on his pillows. He had had a feverish night; he felt sick now in his stomach; he was unable to eat a morsel; he declined to smoke a cigarette; he was insatiable only for endless cups of strong tea.

Mary was boldly sounding Tom on the delicate topic of his marrying Tossie; and she was telling him that if they did marry, there was an unfurnished room to be let on the floor beneath their own in this same house.

“It would be so nice, Tom,” she said, “for us all four to be together; and I could look after the children sometimes, while you and Toss get away for an afternoon.”

“You . . . don't . . . think,” muttered the cautious Tom who was on his knees by the fire with the toasting-fork, as he glanced furtively round at Mary, afraid of being rushed by a conjunction of feminine influence out of some precious bachelor freedom whose benefits he might be forgetting at this time. “You . . . don't . . . think . . . that . . . being married would spoil it all?”