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Sam in his unimaginative simplicity thought the girl was doing this'for fun, or at least in amiable irritation. He was so full of her startling words about Nell that to have his hair seized upon and his skull shaken was an interlude of small moment. But when she let him go. and flung herself down sobbing upon the bear rug, he realised that it was anything but fun. He realised then that he knew no more about the ways of women than he knew about the philosophy of “Neetsky” in dealing with them. He crouched down by her side on the bear rug and did his best to console her, not daring to snatch her arm away from her eyes, but petting and coaxing her in every way he could think of, and talking endearingly and tenderly to her. But she seemed to come to herself quite independently of his blundering consolation. All at once she scrambled swiftly to her feet. A curious notion had suddenly come into her head.

“Get me your coat,” she said. “I want to put on your coat”

He obeyed her. He fetched his great coat. He held it for her, while she slipped into it. Very gently, as he stood behind her, he extricated her curls and let them hang free over the collar. She took him by the hand and led him to the sofa* It satisfied something very deep in her to feel that old overcoat she knew so well wrapped about her. It was like covering herself with the finer essence of her love. She was completely mistress of herself now, and of Holy Sam too, as this latter felt in the very marrow of his bones!

Every woman—the most abject as well as the most beautiful— has certain moments in her life when the whole feminine prin« ciple in the universe seems to pour through her, and when men, when every man obeys her in helpless enthrallment as if she held the wand of Circe. This was the great hour of Grummie's life, nor was she ignorant of the nature of the magic that now flowed through her veins.

“Mr. Sam,” she said when they were seated side by side upon the sofa, “you must go back to Mrs. Zoyland; back to her and to your child—no, stop! I've not finished—I don't mean go back to the Vicarage! You're perfectly right in leaving your father. You couldn't live out your new ideas freely without being incta pendent. And, as I say, those are some things women know more about than men; and one is that people who love each other ought to live alone together—never with a third one! When you left your Nell, you did it because you thought kissing her and loving her in tha& way was wrong. She never thought it was wrong! And now, Mr. Sam, you must live with her again; for I tell you those things are not wrong. But not at the Vicarage. She ought never to have gone there! That's the one thing I cannot understand in Mrs. Zoyland, that she ever agreed to stay under the same roof with two men like you and your father.” She paused upon this, giving Sam a flash of something more dangerous from her soft grey-blue eyes than he had ever received. She looked so incredibly lovely in the dim light of that solitary candle, with her bright loose curls flowing over his own coat collar that Sam stared at her in humble admiration.

He was not in a mood to take exception to anything she said; and once having broken the ice and having got control of herself, she seemed prepared to say a great deal.

“You are both . . . very good men,” she went on gravely, "buS Mr. Dekker cares nothing what people think. He doesn't seem to realise what scandal-makers that old man and that old woman are! You ought at once to take Mrs. Zoyland away. Then you and she will be the ones to get into trouble—if there is any trouble, and not your father. We're in the middle of great changes here in Glastonbury. Mrs. Zoyland and you, if you're brave enough to despise the Miss Drews and Miss Fells of the town, will have the support of her brother Mr. Spear, and of course of my father and Mr. Trent. I don't know what furniture you've got in your attic in that Old Malt House—you see I know all about you, Mr. Sam!—but if you haven't got enough up there to make a woman and child comfortable you ought to take furnished rooms.

Why don't you go to Dickery Cantle's, Mr. Sam? IWre not fussy or squeamish there. Besides Mr. Spear lives there now, and he's her brother. He'd help you with your expenses. He gets a good salary since my father's made him one of the big men in Glastonbury."

Sam's whole nature was in a turmoil. As the girl's rapid, practical words followed one another, they carried a shameful conviction with them. Yes, he had been unforgivably selfish in all he had done! Little thought had he given to the passionate torment of his father, tantalized by Nell's sweet presence, and bearing the whole weight of that ambiguous situation. Little had he thought of what Nell might be enduring. He had thought solely of himself, solely of his own soul in relation to his martyred God; and meanwhile he had been cruel to his girl, and if not cruel to his father, at least completely irresponsible, completely careless of his peace of mind. With a lover's instinct combined with the instinct of a son he knew exactly what his father would suffer if he took Nell away; but he knew also—who better?—the deep relief with which the older man left to himself, and free from this daily tantalisation of his darker mood, would revert to his simple, traditional, unquestioning faith. Besides, Nell would go and see him. She could go often and see him. He wouldn't be separating those two. By removing her from the Vicarage he wouldn't be taking her out of his father's life.

Thus as he watched that white face in the dimness, framed in its wavy curls, he gave himself reason upon reason for obeying the competent advice wThich came so impressively from its lips. But, as he listened, the image of his sweet love's form, the caressing sound of her voice, the whole aura of her personality, rose up in the very heart of his being. It was perhaps an ironic thing, but the truth was that the mood he had been thrown into by his vision of the great Glastonbury Mystery had abolished all his -ascetic scruples about making love to Nell. Such scruples seemed to him now like a tight, irrelevant, self-inflicted contrariety !

There is no doubt that if ever Sam came to talk of the secret things of his life—which was not very likely—with Mr. Evans, that incorrigible biographer of Merlin would have found this particular effect of the Grail Vision a proof that the thing was a thing of magic, and not of religion; and likely enough—like the Mwys of Gwydion-Garanhir—was an actual symbol of fertility!

“Well, Mr. Sam, I've got to have supper with Miss Drew tonight; and it's now five minutes to the hour she expects me!”

Even as she spoke he was making his great decision.

'Til take you to her door, little Crummie,“ he said. ”You've been more than a crumb of the loaf to me tonight; and if I do manage to establish myself at Dickery Cantle's, I'll pray to you every day as if you were a god."

So he spoke, recalling a passage in one of the old poignant Homeric scenes, which he had had to read when he was in the sixth form at Greylands School.

“Will you?” she exclaimed, leaping to her feet and rushing to the chimney-piece where their only candle was guttering down. “Will you?” she repeated, occupied with the struggle to light a second flame from the one that was drowning in its own melted wax.

And then he became aware from the heaving of her shoulders under his heavy coat that Crummie was crying—not audibly, as she had done after shaking him, but silently. Having lit that second candle, she seemed to be seized with a mania for lighting candles, and went round the room doing it everywhere, but keeping her face hid from him. She might just as well have spared herself this illumination of her tragedy, for the tears were still running down her cheeks when she turned round.

“I don't know why I'm doing this,” she said. “It must be thankfulness because you're going to do what I've told you to do.” As she spoke she made an heroic effort to smile. For the beat of a swallow's wing she could not compass it. Then she did; and the smile which wavered up, lovely and tender, from the very bottom of her soul, made her face, under the up-mounting flames of all her candles, more beautiful than any face that Holy Sam had ever seen.

On their way to Miss Drew's—and they traversed Magdalene Street to its end and then followed Bere Lane to the Tithe Barn, thus avoiding the town—Crummie talked to him unreservedly about her father. “He is fonder of me,” she said in a low voice, when they reached the great medieval barn and paused confronting it, "than Mother thinks he ought to be. Mother never has liked it. But I think nothing of it! I think it's silly to have those ideas about it. I suppose Fm queer in things like that: and so is Father, except when it worries Mother. I don't mind— why should I mind?—his loving me so.15

“The last time I talked to him,” said Sam. “I thought he was rather restless; but that may have been these communistic ways of running the town.”

“Fve never told this to a living soul,” said Crummie, “but sometimes Father frightens me. Not with his petting and so on: for I don't care tuppence about that. But once or twice lately he's talked of death with such an extraordinary look on his face! Almost always he talks of death when he's been petting me, or has seemed especially fond of me, but not unhappily, mind you! It's rather as if—it's so hard to put it, Mr. Sam!—as if there were another me, someone like me, only of course much more exciting, down there in Hades. Fve seen his eyes, Mr. Sam —and you know how dark they are!—shine like funnels of hlack fire when he's been talking of death and holding me on his knee.”

“Were you surprised that I should see the Holy Grail?” asked Sam irrelevantly.

“Fve thought you were seeing it all the time!” said Crummie quickly.

He was looking at the strange apocalyptic creatures on the barn now, and he thought to himself that there was something ahout them that reminded him of Mr. Geard. In fact it was easy for him to imagine that Mr. Geard's architect, after the Mayor was dead, might carve a fifth evangelistic symbol for this new Gospel. Sam even began to think of his own “Iehthus—the World-Fish.”

He left Crummie at Miss Drew's drive gate, and waited there till he heard, by the sound of the opening and closing door, that she was safely in the house. In the confused waves of the exultant happiness which she, the “Crumb of the Loaf,” as he had called her, had given him, soaking up for him and interpreting in practical terms the meaning of his Vision, Holy Sam had blundered again more grossly, more unpardonably, than he had ever done in his life. He had made a clumsy and awkward attempt to kiss Crummie. The girl had turned her head away and he had only brushed her cheek, but the contact of her flesh, at the entrance to that damp and dark shrubbery of the Abbey House, chilled him to the bone, as if he had touched that other, that Cimmerian Crummie, in the realms of Death, of whom her father was so enamoured!

As he turned away and crossed the road to enter his father's drive gate Sam had the wit to» realize that he had acted grossly in trying to kiss her. He had made the gesture in simple and spontaneous gratitude, She knew that as well as he did. Why then had she turned her head away? She turned it away so that the great Love of her life, the secret Ideal of her girlhood, should not kiss her on the lips before he went in to her rival. Would she then have let him kiss her if there had been no question of Nell; but only the fact between them that he did not love her? Oh, still less so, Oh, far less so! For it might easily have been that this matter of rivalry would have led her to snatch fiercely, wickedly, maliciously, at his proferred kiss; but nothing would have induced her to let him kiss her on the lips—she loving him and he not loving her—if that malice of rivalry hadn't entered. Crummie being what she was, it had not entered, and her lips remained virginal. And yet she had been kissed full upon the mouth, again and again, by many of the men who had been wont to caress her.

Oh, deep beyond understanding is this curious secret! The whole Being of the coldest, plainest, ugliest girl in the world resembles a sensitive plant whereof her reluctant lips are the leaves. Organised for receptivity by the whole structure, substance and nerve-responses of her identity, the electric yieldingness of a girl's body vibrates to the least pressure upon her mouth. Only the craftiest and subtlest of lovers know the preciousness, the tragic, unique, perilous preciousness, of that moment when, under the pressure of a kiss, her lips are parted.

The two greatest Realists that have ever lived, those superhuman delvers into the crook of a knee, or the dimple of a cheek, or the furrow of a brow, or the hollow of an eye-socket, Dante and Leonardo da Vinci, were at one in finding in women's lips the enteleclieia of all Nature's secretest designs. A man*s laugh—what a simple, nondescript “haw! haw! ho! ho!'” that sound is, half a lion's roar and half an ass's bray, compared with the subtle waxing or waning, the broken ripple of the moon's reflection upon flowing water, of a woman's smile! To Dante a maid's smile meant the latitude of the least little span of a thin eyelash between inexorable Acheron and the mystical circles of the Empyrean; and to Leonardo the wavering beginning of a girl's smile carried, folded within its calyx, the blue veins of her thighs, the wild-rose tips of her nipples, the arch of her instep, the silkiness of her flanks, the unfathomable recessions of her final yielding to the pressure of desire.

Some shamefaced and scattered inkling of all this hovered about Holy Sam's mind as he entered the familiar driveway of his father's home. Oh, he had been brutally selfish in all this whole business of his relations with the people of his life! But he would change it all now. He would take this new happiness of his and lavish it among them!

Sam hurriedly opened the front door of the Vicarage and plunged at once, as a dog into the odour of a familiar kennel, into the well-known smell of his birthplace. He heard the voices of Penny and Mr. Weatherwax raised loudly in the kitchen and he felt glad that some lively interest of their own had prevented them from hearing his entrance. For a second he stood listening and hesitating, “this way and that dividing the swift mind,” unable to decide whether to go in to his father first, or run up to Nell.

But it was to his girl and his child that he must betake himself now; now and for the rest of his days! That was the mandate of th* Grail. That was the dictate of her, whose word, “ 'ee 'as the fice of a sighnt,” had started him on his quest. As lightly as he could—but he was a heavy man and the stairs creaked woefully—he rushed to the upper landing. He found himself actually forming upon his lips his cry to his Love, “I have come back to you; back to you forever!” and, as people do, outside a door that will reveal, in a second, a dear and familiar form, he hugged her to his heart in his mind with the very cling of reality. He knocked lightly twice—two little sharp, excited raps with his knuckles—and then without waiting for a reply flung open the door.