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“Please yourself, Sir,” conceded this authority. “Please yourself; and tike them lidies to their famblies, stright now, Thompson; this ain't no bloomin' esplanade.”

When they reached the tent that had been allotted to Mrs Geard, she certainly embraced her husband and daughter with more emotion than she was accustomed to display. Did she feel any premonition of what was coming? There can be no doubt that some curious electric telepathy does sometimes link together the present and the future. Not always, however! That mysterious act of the human will, that resembles creation out of nothing and that every living soul shares with its begetter, the First Cause, has the power of breaking up and completely altering any fatal series in the mysterious streams of causative energy. But so powerful, in Bloody Johnny's case, was his desire to die, so strong was his conviction that his Master had resolved that he should die, that this arbitrary wilful power in his nature could naturally be discounted in advance. This being the case, while for Mrs. Geard and for Fred Thompson, the soldier who could not row, and for Nancy Stickles and for Young Tewsy, the future might be malleable, for Mr. Geard the future was decided—and decided entirely by himself.

“Well, my chicks,” he now remarked with an easy sigh. “I can't stay all day with you up here in this elegant tent. Bugger me black, but these officer-lads know how to make themselves comfortable! Is this the sleeping quarters they've given us? 'Tisn't like whoam, ha? . . . but it's all shipshape. Well! I'm off, my pretties. There'll only be need for one night for 'ee up here. I know that. So tomorrow you'll be back in the old bed, Megan.”

He looked queerly at his wife as he said this, weighing to himself what she would feel tomorrow night without her John. The man's detachment just then was so abysmal that he could even conjure up the way she would go about the house without him, and how in the midst of her bewildered grief she would get comfort in thinking out every detail of his funeral, including the very smallest matters, such as whether to bury him in one of his old flannel shirts, or to use one of her best linen counterpanes. She would wonder, too, he felt sure, whether to» let Crummie wear her new black hat, which was black, but not mourning-black, or whether to buy her a real funeral one at Wollop's!

“Well, I'm off,” he repealed, but, instead of departing, he took his seat on a shaky camp-stool and pulled Crummie down upon his knees. “ Tisn't every man o' my age,” he murmured, using, as he always did when he was upset, the old Montacute accent “has a darter as pretty as you be and unmarried, too, and a comfort to thee's wold parents.”

“Well, if you be going to go, John, ye best go now,” said Megan crossly. She never liked it when Crummie sat on her father's lap and she was afraid now that the soldiers could see into the tent. She was unpacking her old black vanity-bag at that moment, into which she had stuffed all manner of alien objects, and the way she did this, trying to make herself at home under these weird conditions, and glancing at herself in the little mirror she took out, and1 pushing back her grey hairs with both her hands under her lilac bonnet, struck Bloody Johnny with a sudden rush of overpowering tenderness.

“Don't 'ee forget, my precious,” he blurted out, addressing his wife from behind Crummie's white neck, which filled his nostrils with a faint, sweet smell, as of new-mown hay, “don't 'ee forget to go every month now, and draw that monthly annuity I've arranged for Bob Stilly to pay 'ee. I be liable, 'tis a great sin, but so it is with me, to get so lost in me work at Town's End that my memory baint what it used to be.”

“What are you talking about, John? There be no need for us to go to bank, as long as these councilmen bring your salary in a chamois-leather case like they've always done. What are you thinking about? You ain't going to try rescuing folk, be 'ee, in one of them tipply boats?”

“No, no. That's all right, my angel. I only meant—I only mentioned—I'm not going to get into any boat—don't 'ee think it!—only I've got things to see to. After all, I be Mayor, my treasure; and mayors be like captains of ships; they don't sit in cabins. They go on deck.”

Crummie slipped off his knee and faced him. “I won't have you going anywhere, Dad!” she cried with flashing eyes. “Mother's quite right. Your place is with us when things be as terrible as they be today.”

Bloody Johnny got up slowly and stiffly. His expression was such that Crummie yielded at once. The voices that reached their ears through that tent door were of a kind that he had never thought to hear in Glastonbury. Some woman was now screaming pitifully, someone was dragging her away. “Good-bye till tonight, my chicks,” he said in a low voice. “I suppose,” he added to Cxummie, “your mother and I are to sleep in there . . . and you are to sleep here? Is that how they've fixed it up? Well— the same earth will be under all our beds, I reckon, wherever we sleep. Don't 5ee be afeared! I won't be long.”

He moved aside the flap of the tent and went out. There was no sign of the woman he had heard screaming; but he noticed, as he emerged, that some kind of orderly had been placed at the entrance, with the idea, evidently, of keeping less privileged homeless persons from encroaching upon the Mayor's privacy.

“A bad business, Sir,” said the man, peering past Bloody Johnny into the interior of the tent. The psychology of refuge camps had already begun to work, and the beauty of Crummie's person had not been missed by this guardian of her retreat.

“All life's a funny business, lad,” replied Mr. Geard; and then, fumbling in his pocket, he produced one of the council's half-pound notes. “Put this in your pocket, boy,” he said, “and don't let anyone frighten the ladies. I'll be back soon.”

“Oh, Mother, Mother, what shall we do?” cried the girl, when the tent-flap swung back and the two were left alone, “I don't believe we'll ever see him again!”

Megan Geard hugged the agitated young woman to her heart, a thing she had not done—not in this solemn way—since Crum-mie was a small child. “We must pray for him, my pet. Don't 'ee take on so; don't 'ee, Crum! The good Lord be above all still.”

No one took the least notice of the burly bare-headed man in his old greenish-black coat and his turned-up shiny black trousers, as he hurried off down the hillside towards the surging crowd at the flood's edge. There happened to be a very small boat emptying itself of a lanky young labourer from Paradise who was carrying an infant child.

“It's my boat,” growled the youth sulkily, as Mr. Geard, pushing impetuously through the crowd, snatched up the oars.

“It was your boat,” replied the Mayor; but he added more kindly, a second after, as he pushed one of the oarblades deep into the grass to steady the little craft while he stepped into it. If you can't find anyone to take your child, somiv. ask for the Mayor's tent and tell Mrs. Geard that Mr. Geard said____'?

His voice, was lost in the arrival of a big flat barge, punted by Sam and his father, each armed with an enormous pole. It was a hay-barge from the Brue; and the Dekkers, after having been twice upset out of less solid craft, had at last found a"vessel suited to both their weight and their strength. Water dripped from their drenched clothes. Sweat poured from their tired faces. But the impression that Mr. Geard received from them both was that of an exultant happiness.

It is a recurrent phenomenon in the affairs of men that certain emotional conflicts, which no normal events can affect nor any spontaneous efforts alter, are brought to an end, reconciled, harmonised, blotted out, by some startling elemental catastrophe. It was not until they both had been working desperately for some hours at rescuing marooned people that the father and son met, but when once they had met—without a word having been spoken between them of a personal character—it was taken for granted by both of them that they should remain together. Once in possession of this huge hay-barge they began picking up the terrified and stranded people from their flooded houses in far larger numbers than any other rescuers, except, perhaps, those who used the motor-boat from Bridgewater.

It gave Mr. Geard, in the midst of all the conflicting emotions that were surging through him, a feeling of puzzled satisfaction to confront this glowing emanation of primeval life-zest. He looked at the two big men in amused wonder. They seemed drunk with delight at simply being together. Strong and deep love between a father and a son is not rare. But the maudlin, doting, inebriated rapture of these two as they helped their tottering cargo to disembark, for it had been people from the old men's almshouse they had been rescuing, seemed the most extreme example of such a feeling that Mr. Geard had ever encountered.

The Dekkers were both completely exhausted. It was easy to see that. But the passionate surge of life-joy which they revealed, hauling, dragging, heaving, lifting, balancing and wading, was something that carried a curious and special elation to Bloody Johnny's mind. It was no easy task to get their cargo of aged and feeble almshousemen out of their barge and on to the land; and some of the old people looked quite dazed and at the end of their tether. But Mr. Geard, taking hold of one of his own oars with both hands, was able to give the stern of the big barge a most timely propulsion, for which Sam, who was nearest to him, gave him a grateful nod.

“Thank you, Sir! That's just right. One more shove and you'll get us in.”

Mr. Geard repeated his effort, but being not much more skilful at these manoeuvres than young Private Thompson, there was no small danger of his falling headfront into the water between the boat and the barge. Sam, however, caught at his oar-blade and flung him back. He collapsed across the seat .of his tiny skiff, but the little tub righted itself, and all was well.

“Look 'ee here, Mr. Mayor, what my father insisted on putting in!” Taking advantage of Mat Dekker's lifting one of the old men out and wading with him through the water, Sam stooped down in the stern of the barge and lifted up a rabbit-hutch. “Three lop-ears and one little black one!” he shouted above the uproar. “The Vicarage, you know, is high and dry; and I think Miss Drew's all right, though her servants got panicky. I saw them perched on their drive gate calling to every boat that passed. But I'll have to hang on to this hutch till Father goes home. We found it in the water near Backwear Hut, where Abel Twig lives. We couldn't see anything of the old man. We punted far out of our way till we were quite close to his place. But nothing except the chimneys could we see. It's so near the river. The water's terribly deep there. All you can see are a few mounds— the Ancient British mounds.” All these remarks Sam shouted to Mr. Geard as the current of the flood swept between them and carried the latter's little boat away.

Bloody Johnny nodded farewell to him as he took his oars firmly in his hands and set himself to row in the direction of those Ancient British mounds. He rowed directly towards the river which he realised he could easily follow by reason of its swifter current, and which he knew, after it had skirted Beckery and Paradise, would lead him near Lake Village Field. What am had said about Abel Twig's rabbit-hutch and about the old lan's chimneys being all that was visible had been accepted by tloody Johnny as an omen sent by his Master. “Rescue Abel ”wig,“ he muttered to himself, ”Rescue Abel Twig------"

He was now resolutely set upon dying, set upon dying before tight fell. He did not think of this as suicide. The thought of uicide never once crossed even that nimbus of feeling which onnects the double horns of the mind, like the old moon within he crescent of the new moon. Mr. Geard had the peculiarity of )el)eving absolutely and without question in the existence of the lext world. He also knew for certain, by the evidence of personal experience, that a living Being, who might, or might not, be the Christ the churches worshipped, awaited his presence in what he jailed “the. next dream.” Mr. Geard had been made to understand Dy the mediumship of this Being, that conditions of life after the leath of the body were immeasurably superior to those now existing. He had also been promised that this Being would meet liim face to face and would satisfy to the full the accumulated srotic desires, at once mystical and sensual, which were the master-craving of his nature.

Not long after Mr. Geard's death, not long after the sifting put of all these dramatic events, one of the cleverest women psychologists of our time brought forward an interpretation of the man's mood on this fatal day that deserves to be recorded. According to this view of his feelings during these last hours of his life,, the stress ought to be laid upon the curious pathological necessity, under which he was known to labour, of actually sharing with all his bodily nerves the physical suffering of those around him. This authority hesitated not to point out that in the case of Tittie, and in the case of the idiot-boy outside the Pilgrims', and in the case of Owen Evans in the hospital, the man had been seep, to display actual physical signs of suffering exactly parallel to those endured by Mrs. Petherton, and by the boy, and by Mr. Evans as he told his stupendous story. The amazing—but surely not impossible explanation—offered by this penetrating woman is that a violent psychic radiation from all the minds of the twenty-seven people, including -children, who were actually drowned during those twelve ghastly hours riddled Mr. Geard's hyper-sensitised and super-porous sympathy with what might be called the drowning-spasm, and produced in him a craving for death by drowning that really amounted to a kind of drowning-hypnosis. This brilliant writer points out further, in regard to the mystery of the death of Geard of Glastonbury, that his growing preoccupation with the Grail Fount on Chalice Hill was itself a hydro-philiastic obsession. While many pathological subjects, this writer maintains, seek a pre-natal peace in death, what Mr. Geard in his planetary consciousness desired was a return to that remote and primal element of Water, which was literally the great maternal womb of all organic earth-life. It was this woman's far-fetched pamphlet that with its use of pathological technical terms had such a large share in turning the attention of intellectual people away from the religious aspects of the problem.