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Philip simply could not understand this exhibition of school-girlishness at this particular moment and in this particular place. But he was too relieved that it was not any emotional reaction or any distress in her, to feel angry with her as she struggled to regain her composure. He felt a slight sensation of being made a fool of, but not to any embarrassing extent. How could he know that the deepest rift between his cousin and her husband had been that during the whole three years of their marriage Dave Spear had never once shown one single flicker of humour. And here, in her seducer of this mad night under the roots of the Mendips, she had suddenly recognized the same lack! It was the contemplation of Philip's portentously grave face— grave with the gravest of all emotions in the world!—that, combined with the strangeness of her surroundings, had brought on that fit of laughing. She had laughed exactly as a child laughs in church; simply because she knew it would be outrageous, unseemly, inartistic, and even a little monstrous to get a laughing-fit at such a moment! Of course, the fact that Persephone could laugh like that, under the circumstances, was a revelation of her character. It showTed the detachment of her soul from her senses. It showed that, at the core of her being, there was a profane mocking demon, that scrutinised derisively, in cold blood, every situation in wThich she found herself.

But Percy's burst of laughter only shamelessly expressed what many and quite normal women have often felt; namely, the grotesque gravity of masculine lust. It is possible that Aphrodite herself was called “laughter-loving” by her lover Ares when he was furiously angry with her. In any case, it was queer enough to hear such a ringing peal of shameless girlish mischief rising up from the plutonian edge of that ghastly water.

What gave the whole scene, too, an element of fantastic bizarrerie was the fact that the fallen flashlight illuminated at this moment only the girl's legs, leaving the rest of her figure in dark shadow.

Philip held out his hands to her at last; and she became quiet and quite calm when he lifted her up upon her feet. He allowed their flashlight to remain on the ground. He pulled her back a little way, wThere the rock was smoother, under the dark wall of the cavern. "Do you see where the water disappears. Perse?*' he said, making her sit down by him. Their backs were now resting against the side of the cavern; and from this position they could follow the long beam of the prostrate flashlight which now illuminated for them a strange phenomenon. ]\Tot more than a dozen yards from where they crouched, the water flowed under a low, flat bridge of solid stone. There was only about three feet of hollow space between the outflowing water and the massive rock that hung above it.

“One day, Perse, I'll have a barge made, flat enough to carry me under that rock, and back again. No one can tell what I may not find if I follow that water!”

She threw her arms round his neck and gave him a quick, passionate kiss. “I'll go with you, Phil, if you do!”

The horizontal beam projected by their fallen light wTas wide enough, before it reached this vanishing-point of the illuminated water, to throw into evidence a strip of soft greyish sand a little distance off. As a contrast to the weird colours thrown out by the copper, iron, lead, and manganese in the walls of the cave, this strip of grey sand assumed an appearance of Cimmerian neutrality.

Persephone showed no surprise and no reluctance when he took her by the hand to lead her there.

The level beam of flashlight fell upon the hem of her dress and upon her feet, while the rest of her remained in shadow. Her slender ankles, resting motionless there side by side, suddenly struck Philip's mind with a sense of extreme human pathos. They looked like a doll's ankles; and they hit his fancy as being so quaintly irresponsible, so oddly detached! They had to carry all this hurden of a girl's turbulent heart, her blunders, her errors, her triumphs, through the long track of her days; and what had they done?

He opened one of his precious boxes of Swan Yestas, casting,“ as he did so, a fellow-bandit's leer in the direction of the flashlight. ”You've served me well, old hoy,“ his look said, ”but I'm glad I'm not quite dependent on you!" He lit her cigarette and then lit one of his own. The tortoise-shell case that had held them took on in his eyes at that moment the welcome reassurance of a familiar possession in a strange surrounding. For a few minutes they smoked side by side in a delicious languor of contentment and peace. Certainly, if the girl had held up a lighted match to his face at that moment she would have seen upon it what William Blake says women love best of all to see.

Philip's fierce prcdatoriness had melted into the sweet security of possession; while Percy's proud wilfulness had melted into the delicious passivity of being possessed. No thought of their treachery, no thought of Dave or of Tilly came to disturb their peace. The satisfied physical desire of each of them had transformed itself into an indescribable tenderness for the bodily presence of the other one. It was as if their two souls—like the souls of a pair of triumphant chemists brooding above the successfully mingled elements in a passive crucible—awaited the creative act of the occult life-force. Their bodies felt as though they were still linked together in an indescribable sweetness of identity, while their minds felt a profound reluctance to allowing any hasty movement of thought to tilt the brimming cup of their bodies' satisfaction and spill the precious ichor. So strong was the bent bow of their proud contentment that in the twanging of its string it shot their spasm of gratitude straight to the heart of the Cause of Life. And unlike the prayer of John and Mary from the surface of the sun-lit Wissey, this singular cry from the banks of the Styx reached the good in the nature of the Eternal Being and dodged the evil. By pure chance—as in the other case—did this occur; but in its ocur-rence it brought a backwash of profane delight down there to that strip of grey sand such as that ancient spot, in all its prehistoric longevity, had never known before. The luck which that spasm of gratitude from these two cousins stole from the double-natured Cause of Life continued to soothe their nerves even after they had risen from their Cimmerian bed and re-crossed their Styx.

The girl's cynical detachment neutralized this luck in the end; but all the long journey back it remained with them. It remained with them even when they had finally parted at their adjoining doors on the little upper landing of the Zoyland Arms, he to re-enter his solitary room of the dead (lies, she to clamber across the sleeping, or apparently sleeping, body of her husband and to stretch herself out and make herself as imperceptible as she could close up against the thin, hard, wooden partition that now separated her from the owner of Wookey Hole.

Mr . Owen Evans9 seated by the gas-stove at the back of Old Jones' shop, was enjoying a late breakfast. It was the day following the one wherein Philip Crow conducted Persephone to his subterranean kingdom. Mr. Evans' breakfast differed a great deal from the breakfast partaken by Mayor Wollop on the preceding morning. It lacked the Mayor's invisible attendants. It lacked the Mayor's Dundee Marmalade. It lacked the Mayor's Western Gazette. In place of this latter purveyor of topical items, Mr. Evans' bodily refreshment—consisting of a pot of tea and three stale rolls—was heightened by the presence of an old edition of the Inferno in the original Italian, open at the page that describes the blasphemous obstinacy of the heathen giant, Capaneus.

“As I was then” howled this unconscionable rebel against the Emperor of the Universe, “such am I stilll”

Mr. Evans found no difficulty in translating this passage, even though the lettering of the old book was such a stumbling-block to modern eyes; and in his troubled response to its terrible import he placed no less than half of all the butter he possessed upon the piece of roll-crust which he now proceeded to munch in absent-minded voracity.

He was disturbed by a heavy knock upon Number Two's shop-door. He cursed audibly and glanced angrily at one particular clock, among all the old ticking timepieces, which he had grown accustomed to consulting. He consulted this one not because it kept better time, but because he pitied its woebegone face. He cherished the fancy—in his confused South Wales mind—that he might restore the prestige of this silly old clock among its grander companions if he made this little diurnal preference. But the clock only confirmed the knock. The knock and the clock said the same thing. “Reading done . . . business begun,” said the clock and the knock.

Mr. Evans angrily opened the shop-door. This proceeding took more time than one would have supposed the stock-in-trade of Number Two justified. Never were there so many or such rusty.

THE UXPARDOXABLE SIN

Lolls! But the Welshman zol them ail d'd^n at laA: d'i\i n.d In the face and panting haid lie opened thp hairicacitd ckor. Into the shop stepped Sam Dekker. Sam's face, tu am one v.hi* saw it less frequently than his father and Penny Pitches. v*ouid ha\e displayed a startling change. It had changed from the face of a lad to the face of a man. Sam had come to know something of the terms upon which the happiness of being alive has been offered us.

“How do )ou do, Mr. Evans,” he said. “Oh, you are having your coffee! I'm awfully sorry I've disturbed you.”

He made no motion however to go away; but proceeded to remove his coat and hat, and lay them both, together with his stick, upon one of Number Two's best specimens of the art of eighteenth-century chair-making. Then he sat down: and Mr. Evans, bringing up his own chair from the rear of the shop, sat down too.

“I've come to ask you rather a funny question. Sir/' the visitor began, ”but if you knew how few people in Glastonbury have books, or care anything for books, yoifd understand my coming to you. By the way, do you people—does Old Jones, I mean—sell books as well as antiques? Has he got any old books here? Any old . . . you know? . . . any old theological books?"

The Welshman's face assumed a very odd expression. “YesP he said with a sort of resigned hesitation. ”Oh, yes! There are quite a lot here. I've been going through them. They're down in the basement. It was chiefly because of them that I consented to undertake this shop. Oh, yes! There are quite a lot of interesting books down there, Mr. Dekker. But I don't know-------"

There was a moment's silence during which the shrill cockney voice of Mrs. Robinson addressing herself to Grandmother Cole, as the ladies moved slowly downtown on their way to St. John^s Church, entered through the closed door.

“If 'twere only a rat what gnawed 'en 'twill be a heasy bit o' 'emming; but if what *ee seed to-die be goin' to be worse tomorrow, then 'tis more nor rats! Then 'tis moth. And if 'tis moth, 'twill be 'ell's own job. If 'tis moth, I'd sigh 'No, Mr. Vicar! Not hon your little life will I hundertake sech a 'eart-breakin' job!'”

Sam couldn't restrain a faint grin at this overheard revelation of a labour-revolt in the ecclesiastical sphere; but Mr. Evans lacked all sense of humour in such matters. The man's hooked nose, sardonic eyebrows and long upper lip looked as impenetrable to High Street back-chat as the bust of Dante itself which he was now regarding with a secretive eye. The charwoman and the sewing-woman of St. John's Church passed on down the street; and Sam became as grave as the Welshman.

“I may as well be quite open with you, Sir,” Sam said. “For more than a year now my father has been hoping that I'd accept his offer to send me to a theological college. I've refused to go; and I never shall go. But I ought to ... I want to . . . read a little more. When I was at Corpus------”

Mr. Evans interrupted him. “Corpus!” he cried, leaping to his feet, “do you mean Corpus Cambridge? I was at Oxford myself, but you Corpus people at Cambridge have got a library ... I say you've got a library . . . that would madden Paracelsus himself. There are folios and quartos there that are------” He lowered

his voice and lifting the second finger of his left hand tapped with it the bony knuckle of the first finger of his right hand. 'There are Welsh manuscripts there, my good Sir, that are priceless. They are prejudiced against me there; but that's nothing. I'm nothing. But if they'd let me have those manuscripts and take ihem to South Wales with me and compare them with—Why! my good man!—They are prejudiced against me there; but that's nothing. What am I? Nothing. Nothing at all! But they've got a number of Bardic Triads there ... in an underground chamber ... a Welsh bedmaker told me all about it . . . that give incredible details of Merlin's life! Think of your being at Corpus! They are prejudiced against me there . . , a trifle ... a little . . . They mean well . . . but of course! . . . but that's nothing . . . for what am I? Obviou&ly nothing!"

Sam Dekker watched Mr. Evans' back as he moved about in that stuffy little shop, looking for something. A cold watery sun filtered into the shop through the street-window. This window was full of an extraordinary assortment of ill-chosen objects. One could hardly have called them objects of art. They were more like a Noah's Ark or a raft of candidates for Limbo. There was a cracked Chinese vase decorated by a series of she-dragons each of whom was apparently giving birth to, or being suckled by a double-tailed goldfish. Next to this vase there was a pepper-box of unnatural proportions on the top of which, where it was perforated for shaking, gaped the head of a preposterous Punchinello. A rusty faucet, of ornamental brass, serviceable now for no conceivable purpose, was propped up against the pepper-box. At the base of the vase reposed a white-feathered shuttlecock with a vermilion centre; while between the pepper-box and the window-frame was a small croquet-mallet of a kind that had become quite extinct. Resting on the handle of this croquet-mallet was a large Pacific Ocean shell, on the back of which some meticulous Miss Drew of a hundred years ago had painted a sad little landscape wherein a diminutive goatherd and a gigantic goat contemplated a sinking ship from a green island. Leaning against the rim of this painted shell was a big, old-fashioned shaving-cup, upon the side of which was sketched a distant view of a castle on the Rhine, seen between two nameless trees and above the back of an overloaded mule.