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The green twilight was being sucked down now by undulations of the green earth. The invisible dews were falling. A gusty night-wind was rising up from beyond Queen's Sedgemoor. The first cold stars were coming out over the three horizons. Where the sun had gone down in the west, there lingered only a faint dying trace of the livid before-night whiteness. At this actual moment of the earth revolution, although under very different atmospheric conditions, in China, in India, on the banks of the Danube, by the Black Sea and in the tents of the' Sahara, in battle, murder, pestilence and shipwreck, in bolted doom sudden death was rushing on the hairy scalps of men.

Did Tossie feel her grief worse than any of those who mourned? Or were the moans of some old Chinese wife on the banks of the Yellow River yet more heart-broken, the terrible silence of some despairing Malay in a Singapore hovel yet more crushing? As for John, the worst moment of the whole unspeakable nightmare was when he lifted that plump bundle of wild hysteria from off the body of his friend and laying her on the grass dabbed with his handkerchief at her brow and cheeks and actually removed with his finger and thumb a fragment of Tom's smashed skull from her sticky hair. She rolled over—and he was glad she did, for her face was shocking to him—and began smothering her convulsions in the green grass, her fingers plucking and clutching at its cold earthy roots.

It was then, just before Evans and Cordelia reached them, that he snatched off his overcoat and covered Tom's head and shoulders with it.

“Oh, what has happened? What has happened?” panted Cordelia, “Has that man gone? Has he hurt you? Who is hurt? Is Mr. Barter hurt? Has. he killed Mr. Barter? Where is he? Have you let him go?”

Mr. Evans spoke not a single word. He did two things. And these he did with the punctual, mechanical precision of a consummate actor performing a long-ago perfectly rehearsed part. He stared round him till he caught sight of the iron bar lying on the ground; and stooping down he lifted up the bloodied end from the earth and deliberately wiped it with a handful of grass. Then he went over to where the body was lying. Hesitating for the flicker of a second, he fell on his knees and removing John's coat from Barter's crushed head, gazed at what was revealed.

The sight had an immediate physical effect upon him. He replaced the coat calmly enough; but rising to his feet and turning his back to the corpse, he began vomiting with cataclysmic heav-ings of his tall frame. Was the sexual nerve in Mr. Evans, that sadism-drunk Worm of the Pit, stirred to abominable excitement as he went through these motions? Mercy of Jesus forbid! That nerve-worm lay, stretched out in the man's vitals as he vomited there, cold and constricted, limp as the sloughed off skin of a summer snake.

Cordelia, who had showed signs of being more concerned over Mr. Evans as he swayed and retched, and retched and swayed, than over the murder itself, now sat down on the grass by Tos-sie's side and took her head in her lap. The first time she did this the distracted girl beat her off with her hands and tried to get up and rush over to Barter's body; but the sight of that coat hiding the crushed head brought so sickening a sense of her loss that she hid her face between Cordelia's knees and broke into piteous wailings. These waitings carried no longer, however, that terrifying note in them that her first shrill screams had had, and by degrees they sank down from sheer exhaustion into low moans; till at last the unhappy girl lay quite silent and still.

Mr. Evans, whose paroxysm of vomiting had ceased now, obeyed John with humble docility, as the latter demanded his help in dragging forth the body of the murderer from the tower. This quiet but by no means stupid docility became a fixed habit with Mr. Evans from now on. It was not that the man's sanity was affected by the accumulating shocks of this day. What it seemed to be was a substitution of a definite sense of guilt over Barter's death for the less tangible but far more deadly remorse over his sadistic dreams and fantasies. This new guilt of his the man took calmly, and in a certain sense sanely; but it had a much more disastrous effect upon him from an external and practical point of view than the other. When the twenty-sixth of February dawned poor Cordy was startled to discover that her Owen's hair had turned white. He had indeed become visibly and palpably and in every physical respect, if not an old man, certainly an elderly man.

It was lucky for Cordelia that the tiny annuity, so carefully purchased for her by Mr. Geard, was enough for their bare needs in that little house above Bove Town, on the hill leading up to St. Edmund's Brick Yard; for after this crisis in his days, Mr. Evans found himself quite incapable of going on with his work in Number Two's shop. That really elderly and indeed extremely aged gentleman did not feel it incumbent upon him to regardins now sleeping partner as in any way entitled to share ^ ensuing increment from their more than ever lucrative business!^ nor, in spite of Cordelia's indignation, could she induce Mr. Evans to make any claims.

Slowly and laboriously—sometimes writing no more than a few pages a da^—did Mr. Evans continue working at his life's task, the monumental “Virus. Merlini Ambrosiani”; but luckily for him Cordelia did not extend to the intellectual interests of her husband that impatient contempt which she always felt for her father's religious doctrines.

That culminating scene when she had exorcised, by her heroic gesture behind the brown blinds, the nerve-devil in Mr. Evans, had endeared the man to her in the way mothers are endeared to a deformed or an idiot child; and when her real child perished later after a premature birth she lavished upon its helpless parent all the savage maternal protectiveness that the infant would have claimed if it had lived.

Visitors to Glastonbury can still see, when a little weary perhaps of romantic antiquities they wander up Wells Old Road towards Edmund Hill Lane, with a view of inspecting those famous tile works that have given the town its mellow roofs, a slow-moving, absent-minded, white-haired gentleman, reading a blue-covered book as he walks along or as he leans upon the fence that leads into those suburban fields between Wells Old Road and Maidencroft Lane.

This book, if any passer-by were bold enough to peruse its title, would turn out to be Malory's “Morte D'Arthur,” but such a stranger would not be able to guess that what Mr. Evans is searching for there is something not to be found in Malory at all—nor indeed in any Grail Book, since the time of the great Welshman Bleheris—namely the real meaning of the mystical word Esplumeoir.

It was not, as the devoted Codfin had warned her it had best not be, till all was dark and deserted upon Glastonbury Tor that Mad Bet climbed down those long ladders and made her way home to St. Michael's Inn. So great was the hubbub of voices, all relating various and contradictory versions of that evening's tragedy, and so crowded were bar-room, parlour and kitchen, that it was easy for the demented woman to slip back into her unlit room unobserved by old John Chinnock or by his wife. It was indeed Tom Chinnock, her nephew, who found her outstretched on her bed when he came long after closing-time to bring her her supper. She was still alive and perfectly conscious; but she had hurt her heart in some way in climbing alone down those steep ladders, and she never left her bed again.

Not a word did she breathe as to her share in Barter's death. Not a sign did she make that she wanted to see her “Dilly darling gent,” her “sweet moon's marrow” again before she died; but Tommy Chinnock reported later (for the Terre Gastee stone-thrower was her best friend at the last, though Solly Lew used to come up and sit by her bed of an evening) that the day before she died, which happened on the first of March, she had asked him to go for Mr. Geard.

No one, save Tommy, till his aunt was safe in the Wells Road Cemetery knew that the woman herself had sent for the Mayor; though they all knew that the Mayor had gone up to her room— after having a stiff glass of ale with old John—and had stayed there for nearly half an hour; but no one at all ever learned from the Mayor what passed between them.

Dr. Fell had been summoned to hurry to Wirral Hill long before Mrs. Geard reached Manor House Road, and he had found Miss Crow already in full possession of her consciousness. He thanked the Germans heartily, especially the one with the flask; and then in spite of her weak state, he took the opportunity of scolding Miss Crow very earnestly and roundly for her foolhardy behavior that day.

“A woman like you,” he said as he carried her home in Solly Lew's taxi, “ought to know better than to act like this! What you've really done, Miss Crow, is to try and commit suicide.”

Elizabeth was too weak to defend herself. It did strike her as ironical however, that this doctor, who she knew was in the \abit of defending the right of self-killing, and whose death by his own hand Tossie's Mr. Barter was always predicting, should lapse into this mode of speech.

Dr. Fell had the wil to read what lay behind the smile she gave him.

“The wrong of it lies,” he said, growing rather red in the face and displaying signs of peevishness at being caught by his old friend in so conventional a vein, “the wrong of it lies in the example lhat a happy person like you, with so lucky a temperament ought to give to us poor dogs.”

She was clever enough to take this chance, when she had disturbed his professional aplomb, of asking him point-blank how long he supposed she had to live.

“Five would astonish me,” he said. “Three would surprise me. From my personal experience, such as it is, I'd give you about two.”

“Years, Dr. Fell?”

“Years, years, years!” he answered querulously. “What else do you think I meant? Love-affairs?”

She peered out of the taxi window at the tower of St. Benignus'. She thought of the thousands of times she had looked up at that solid mass of masonry that shared with St John's and the high Tor the distinction of giving its visual character to the town of Clastonbury from all the quarters.

“Is that a shock to you?” he said in a more kindly tone. “I oughtn't to have told you that, I expect”

Sho still continued to look out of the window without replying. Miss Crow's thoughts, just then, were indeed those wordless thoughts of the Vital Principle itself, when the days of the years of its brief life have had their term set by constituted authority.

“You're not upset, I hope?”

The simplicity of this question, addressed to her when she might easily, it was clear, have been lying dead on Wirral Hill, tickled Miss Crow's fancy.

“So upset, Doctor dear,” she replied, “that I hereby invite you to have tea with me in Benedict Street this day three years hence! The twenty-fourth, isn't it?”

Dr. Fell corrected her. “The twenty-fifth,” he said.

“Well? Will you come? And if I'm dead you must come to uiy grave in the cemetery. Is that a promise, Doctor?”

He lifted her hand courteously to his lips. Both of them turned after that to the dirty windows of Solly Lew's taxi; but not to the same window.

The problem that arose immediately after Barter's death, thai arose in both John's and Mary's minds before his body was taken to the police station, was the problem of Tossie and her twins. It was Mary—as she and John lay awake in their room on the floor above, after Dr. Fell had given the stricken girl a sleeping-draught, and Nancy Stickles had been called in to spend the night with her—who first broached the startling suggestion.

“Why don't we take Toss and the children with us to North-wold? Toss could easily get charwork, or laundry-work, or something like that, to do; and I could look after the babies while she was out Old Tom will be happy in his grave if he knows his children are back again in Norfolk. Nothing would please him more than the thought of our taking them with us on the big river.”

“The thought of your taking them!” said John.

“Hush! How can you? You know perfectly well,” she retorted, “which of us- it was that he really cared for.”

“I do know,” he doggedly repeated. “It was you.”

“John!” she cried indignantly, pulling her arm from under his head and sitting up in bed. “You've no right to say such a thing. It's you, first and last, that Tom loved! He came to me when he was in trouble and sad; just as I went to him when I was unhappy; but in his heart of hearts it was always you.”

So she spoke; but neither of them realised how that ill-fated prayer from the boat on the Wissey had been neutralised by Tom, any more than they thought of those silvery fish and those green weeds as things that the dead man would never see again.

“What I cannot for the life of me understand,” said John, for he was too cautious and selfish to commit himself in a hurry to her plan of taking Tossie, “is what motive that man had for murdering him. Old Sheperd said he'd had his eye on him for a long time, and that he suspected him of several burglaries; but what possible grudge could he have against Tom?”

“Why, didn't you hear what Toss was talking about in her hysterics, when Fell gave her that drug?”

“No, I can't say I did. I wasn't listening. I was talking to the policeman and to Mr. Bishop. I didn't come in till you got her quiet again.”

Mary slreLchcd out her hand to the little table which was upon John's side of their bed. She stretched it out above Johns face, and he caught at it with his hand and playfully, and yet not wilhout malice, bit it sharply.

“What are you doing? You hurt me!” she cried with asperity. He chuckled to himself as the taste of her flesh, that taste he loved so well, hung about him, vhile she busied herself with malchbox and candle.

When the little yellow flame was mounting up 'and her red rug and red curtains were coming by leaps and starts into view, she drew back and resumed her own place. But she balanced both her pillows between her shoulders and the head of the bed and sat straight up.

“T've been meaning to tell you this ever since we came upstairs,” she said, “but I kept putting it off.” As she spoke she remembered another occasion when she had kept putting off— an agitating topic; and that was when she had had to tell him about her friendship with Tom, in that boat on the Wissey.