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“Bosh, Toss! What a baby you are! The window's shut because it's a chilly night. The woman's probably in bed.”

“No more in bed than thee be, Tom!” replied his wife with spirit. “Tom don't like I talking about Mad Bet,” she added, “He be more afraid of she than I be!”

“I tell you,” grumbled Barter, more vehemently than the occasion seemed to demand, “that woman is in bed; or else ;he's strolling harmlessly up Tor Hill, just as we are, in the cool of the evening. You Somerset people make too much of an old trot's eccentricity. Your Betsy, or whatever you call her, wouldn't excite any attention at all if she lived in Norfolk. You've pampered her down here and petted her till she thinks she's a regular Mother Shipton.” -

So spoke Tom Barter; and his temper about such a trifle might be considered as a premonitory sign that he was not completely impervious to the distant hum of the catastrophic avalanche.

At that very moment as the three of them reached the gate into Tor Field, the obedient and respectful Codfin was helping Betsy Chinnock to ascend a complicated system of precipitous workmen's ladders which now connected the interior floor of St. Michael's Tower with its ruined belfry, and this again with its airy summit. Here, once more, the Mayor's tireless architect from London had been at work; for the communal council had decided that if a light circular wooden staircase were erected inside from bottom to top, it would be possible to charge a shilling's admission to this magnificent watch-tower, which would greatly increase their weekly revenue. Alone among the council's recent expenditures this invasion of St. Michael's Tower interested the Vicar of Glastonbury, who regarded it as the beginning of that rebuilding of the old church of which he had been talking so long.

Mr. Dekker had indeed several times of late, before even Penny Pitches was down in her kitchen, slipped out of his lonely house and ascended the hill and climbed all these ladders in order to challenge the sunrise and to think about Nell and about his son. They were not difficult ladders to climb; and being inside so narrow a space, a climber was not so liable to dizziness as would have been the case if they had been propped up on the outside.

Not a soul in Glastonbury, if we rule out the infuriated spirit of Gwyn-ap-Nud as too insubstantial a presence to be called a soul—had beheld the Quantocks man's dark figure, standing erect up there at dawn, defying his ancient enemy as it rose like an enormous red balloon out of Bridgewater Bay, and praying there for his son and for his son's lost girl.

It was not the first time that Codfin had attended Mr. Evans9 Grail Messenger upon a climbing adventure, and if overpowering sexual passion had not made the woman's knees shake, very much as Mr. Evans' own knees did when he opened “The Unpardonable Sin,” Codfin would have got her to the top very easily.

To the top he did eventually get her, after a long rest at the black worm-eaten Jacobean oak-beams that were all that was left of the ancient belfry; and if Gwyn-ap-Nud had been more than an insubstantial presence he would surely have taken these two for a real witch being helped to her pulpit of far-flung curses by her attendant demon. Once at the top and leaning over the edge like two mediaeval gargoyles, Codfin snuffed the pure twilight with aesthetic rapture. The fact that he was, in less than half an hour, going to commit murder, rather enhanced than otherwise this natural ecstasy. How could Codfin contemplate so calmly, as he surveyed this aerial landscape, the idea of putting to death a person who had never done him any harm, simply because he was moved to this maniacal issue by this crazy woman? How could Codfin, when he himself enjoyed in so intense a fashion the physical thrill of breathing this fragrant twilight, deliberately condemn another man to eternal unconsciousness, and himself to an almost certain death in a prison courtyard?

The feelings of hired assassins, and such really was Codfin— though what hired him was religious awe for his witch-queen— must be of a different nature from those of all other murderers.

Completely devoid of any previous personal attitude to their allotted victim they take upon themselves to establish between them the most personal of all attitudes. But how could Codfin risk the gallows for the sake of the frenzy of Mad Bet? Ask the fanatic devotee of some outraged idol how he can risk death to avenge his deity!

Mad Bet had become Codfin's deity. To obey Mad Bet had become Codfin's religion. Between two unpleasant experiences— the hangman's rope which he had never felt, and the look of reproach in Mad Bet's eyes which he had felt—he selected, without giving the alternative so much as a second thought, the one that shocked his imagination the less. Compared with the problem of Codfin, however, how easy, how natural, was that of Mad Bet! Mad Bet was actuated, just as Mr. Evans had been, till the nakedness of Mr. Geard's daughter exorcised it, by the nerve-worm of sex.

To be middle-aged, to be of a personal hideousness that was revolting, to be threatened by the county asylum, to be the laughing-stock of the children of several streets, to have a skull under your hat bald as an egg, all these things weigh in the balances as nothing when that little nerve-worm begins to heave and froth and spit.

“There 'un be! Do 'ee see 'un, Missus?” cried Codfin suddenly, lowering his head below the level of the battlements and pressing his companion's shoulder to force her to crouch down.

“Thee be sure 'twon't make 'un suffer, Finn Toller?” she said, as their four eyes watched the three figures entering Tor Field.

Codfin emitted a faint chuckle at this. “Didn't 'ee see thik bar?” he whispered. “Thik bar did make me poor arm ache wi' carrying 'un. Thik bar be enough to stunny a elaphint.”

“Oh, me king, oh, me love, oh, me sweet marrow!” cried the madwoman from the bottom of her worm-driven heart.

“Don't 'ee let they see thee's head over edge of Tower,” remarked the other calmly. “I be going down now. And don't 'ee scream nor cry out anythink when I do it, and don't 'ee holler if thik Barter catches hold of I. Just 'ee stay where 'ee be till all be quiet; and don't 'ee say nothink either to no one when tomorrow be come and they've a put poor Coddy in canary-cage!”

As Finn Toller scrambled quickly down the long ladders to the belfry and then down the others to the floor, he said to himself: “I knewed Mr. Curiosity wouldn't come after all his talk. They scholards what reads of fornications wouldn't fuggle a fly, nor them as reads of stiff 'uns wouldn't drown a cat. But 'a won't tell tales of Coddy neither, for fear of 's own skin!”

With these sagacious comments upon human psychology Mr* Toller went calmly to the place where he had propped up his murderous weapon. Chance or fate—or the air-squadrons of Gwyn-ap-Nud—seemed resolved to make Mr. Toller's task as easy as possible that night.

When the three friends reached the top they turned round and stood panting and out of breath on a ledge of grass a yard or so below the threshold stone of the tower.

Tossie quickly turned their attention to the vast, sad, greenish-coloured plain stretched out before them; and even before they had got their breath she entangled them in the absorbing and piquant subject as to exactly at what spot in this airy map their own Northload house was situated. This was where Chance—or the spirit of Gwyn-ap-Nud—was so favourable to Codfin; for unless the girl had started some especially beguiling topic the second they paused, John would, almost certainly, have gone straight to the tower, following the natural human instinct of attaining an objective, and also obeying a personal fondness for touching cold stones with his hand, and thus made it impossible for the assassin to steal forth from that door with the monstrous piece of iron on his shoulder.

This is however exactly what the murderer was permitted now to do. Step by step, as the girl pointed towards one spot and John pointed towards another and Barter protested that both were too far to the south, Finn Toller came softly and quietly, down the slope behind them, with the iron bar now lifted up in both his hands.

Nature the great healer is also the great destroyer; and the tendency to giggle at the same things and at the same second which had* wiped out all memories of Gladman's House for Barter now wiped out for him all memories of every kind. For a remark that John now made started off the pair of them uttering such ungovernable peals of laughter that Barter was forced to shift his position a little.

In that shifting ©f his position he saw in a flash the figure of Codfin standing behind John and he realised in the twinkling of an eyelid that the hideous instrument in the tramp's hands was already trembling in the air.

The inevitable material laws of balance, of rhythm, of gravitation, of dynamics, had already decided that the iron bar was going to descend on John's head. What they had not counted on, or taken into their mechanical consideration, was the automatic swiftness, swifter than the descent of death itself, with which the instinct of a Norfolk gentleman could express itself in action at a deadly crisis.

To ward off this blow, to arrest this descent of the iron bar, Barter now plunged forward, with the natural result that, in place of the thing descending on his friend's head, it descended on his own, cracking his skull full above the forehead and killing him instantaneously.

Just as twenty-five years ago the yo-ung Tom had come s& often to John's rescue when their boat got entangled in the weeds of the Wissey, so the grown-up Tom, father of twins, and husband of Tossie Stickles, now gave up his life for the same friend on this Somersetshire hill. He was killed instantaneously, the front of his skull being bashed in so completely, that bits of bone covered with bloody hair surrounded the deep dent which the iron made. His consciousness, the “I am I” of Tom Barter, shot up into the ether above them like a released fountain-jet and quivering there pulsed forth a spasm of feeling, in which outrage, ecstasy, indignation, recognition, pride, touched a dimension of Being more quick with cosmic life than Tom had ever reached before in his thirty-seven years of conscious existence. This heightened—nay! this quadrupled—awareness dissolved in a few seconds, after its escape from the broken cranium, but whether it passed, with its personal identity intact, into that invisible envelope of rarefied matter which surrounds our astronomic sphere or whether it perished irrecoverably, the present chronicler knows not.

Tossie flung herself on Barter's body with a piercing scream that rang out over the whole valley. Scream after scream tore itself from that soft mass of clinging female loss till her fair hair was dabbled with Tom's blood and actually entangled with broken bits of hair-covered bone that had been Tom's hard skull.

Some said they heard her screams as far down the valley as Tithe Barn. Lily Rogers maintained she heard them as she picked parsley for Miss Drew's dinner in the Abbey House garden.

John made an instinctive movement to pursue the murderer; but the tramp, hearing wild cries from the slope of the hill, and seeing Mr. Evans and Cordelia rushing up the ascent towards him, dashed back into the tower and clambered, swift as a monkey, up the tall ladders inside. For quite the space of a couple of minutes, after his first motion of pursuit, John stood stock-still, his face so contorted with horror that it assumed the appearance of a wooden puppet, listening in spellbound, frozen apathy to the girl's heart-rending screams,

A semi-cirque of flying rooks, just seven in number, flapped with creaking wings across the top of the tower, making their way northwest towards Mark Moor. Little did they reck of the cracking of the skull of a man upon a patch of grass! As for a tiny earth beetle that was foraging for its insect prey just there, it scurried away from Tom's blood as if it had been a lake of brimstone.

In addition to this, a panic-stricken hare, fleeing in wild terror from the man and woman who were rushing up the hill, came with its long desperate leaps almost up to John's feet, and then, remaining motionless there for a second, rushed past the tower and away down the slope towards Havyatt Gap. The appearance of this hare aroused John from his paralysis. He ran to the door of the tower and pulled it wide open. The couple of minutes' delay, however, had enabled Finn Toller to ascend, for he climbed like an animal rather than a man, to the top of the last ladder; but here he was met by Mad Bet, in a cold paroxysm of frenzied remorse. Without giving her unfortunate devotee time to reach the stone platform where she knelt to receive him, the woman seized the thin bare wrists that Codfin extended towards her and flung him off the ladder. Finn Toller fell backwards, head downwards; and John, stepping hurriedly from the door at the man's death cry, saw his body crash to the ground in a cloud of dust and heard the ghastly thud upon the ground with which his neck was broken.

Like a great bald-headed vulture that has been shot through the wing, Mad Bet, on the stone summit of the tower, crouched with convulsive shudderings against the parapet. Here she lay, without thought or purpose, moaning in a low voice to herself, and covering the cold slab against which she pressed her face with piteous tears and murmuring endearments, as though it were the mangled body of the man who had roused that terrible nerve-worm that devours hearts. Mad Bet had not seen what had really occurred down there. To her disturbed and tragic consciousness, it was John who lay dead at the foot of the tower with his skull smashed in.

There is that about an uttermost sorrow which levels all distinctions; and not Deianeira for Heracles, not Iseult for Tristram, moaned and murmured to her lost love with more absoluteness of pitiful grief than did this bald-headed creature on the top of the tower to her supposedly dead idol. Round about her crouching form a couple of great swifts, those pointed-winged demons of the high air, flew in narrowing circles, uttering their short shrill cries, and these sharp sounds were answered by the melancholy and more familiar wailings of the peewits in the lower levels of Tor Field, disturbed by Tossie's screams and calling out warnings to one another.

Broken under that bar, Mad Bet envisaged the sweet head of her dear love; while the wild screams of Tossie over Tom's body joined the age-old chorus: “Quis desiderio sit pudor aut modus tarn cari capitis?”