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“Manny! Manny!” It was Barbara's voice ringing through the house. He was Manny. His name was really Charles Montagu. Manny had been a nursery nickname, and since it reduced his dignity more completely than anything else his sister was never tired of using it. He wearily got up and opened the door. “Tell Rosie I want her, Manny!” He made three or four steps to the stairs that went down to the basement where the kitchen was and opened the door. “Rosie!” he called. “Yes, Doctor!” “Your mistress wants you.”

Back he came to his study, and again sat down. This time he closed the Enchiridion and flung it on his desk. Once more in that warm dusly June sunshine his head sank down over his knees; and he thought how his sister had managed to spoil the whole of his life. He thought to himself—"What on earth have I lived for all these years? I've not really enjoyed myself, I suppose, on an average, for more than a single hour every day. An hour a day! I wonder how much more than that most people in Glastonbury get, when you add up their pleasant moments?

I can't believe Fd hold back from those morphia tablets for an hour a day! No! It's the hope that keeps me going on. just going on; for that's all it is. It's the hope.“ By what he always thought of in his mind as ”the hope" the Doctor meant nothing less than the death of his sister Barbara.

“Manny! Manny!” Out of his chair he sprang again and oul of his study he flew. Once in the passage he waited for a second, praying that she was only having a row with Rosie. and that this calling for him was a strategic move in a feminine battle. “Manny!”

“Yes, Barbara?”

“Oh, don't say cyes' in that tone”—she was leaning over the bannisters—"Come up, quick! Come here, come herel You must hook me up. Rosie is too helpless for anything!*'

Dr. Fell sighed heavily and began mounting the stairs. Weariness and a great disgust for life weighed upon him. He followed Barbara into her bedroom, even to cross the threshold of which was a purgatorial punishment to him; and as he hooked her up his loathing for her was so intense that the idea of murder came into his mind.

Euphemia Drew's dining-room had all the windows open; but so still was the atmosphere that the six steady flames above the silver candlesticks—for though the western sun came slanting in from between the columns of the Tower Arch she had made Lily light up the table—preserved their small, blue-burning centres of life undisturbed.

“How nice your candles look!” cried old Lawyer Beere, who with his daughter Angela and Mr. Thomas Barter made up the roll of the guests. The old man's grizzled head, flaccid cheeks, and thin, spectacled nose bent again over his plate of clear soup, on the surface of which floated minute wafers of white paste.

But Angela, a grave, fair girl, of about twenty-seven summers —an old man's child—improved upon her father's observation. “Candlelight by daylight always makes me think of Rome,” she remarked.

“So unnatural, the girl means,” said Barbara Fell, “but yon always did have a taste for the artificial, Euphemia.”

Lily Rogers, removing Miss Bibby's soup plate at that mo« ment, was so arrested by this indictment against her mistress that she touched the lady's brimming wine glass, and a tiny trickle of claret ran down upon the cloth. “Salt does it! Don't fret, girl,” cried Miss Fell, covering the red stain with the minute crystals. Lily was not one to fret at such a misfortune while Mr. Barter was looking at her. She plunged, on the contrary, into a prolonged and pensive reverie. But Charles Montagu glanced in surprise at his sister. Why was she so considerate to Lily and so harsh with Rosie?

Was he wrong in disliking that thin, angular, grey face with such heart-burning detestation? She was always amiable to Tom Barter. If Rosie were Lily and he were Barter, would peace, love and harmony reign at Old Town Lodge?

Tom Barter spoke up now. He was impatient to throw all his weight upon the side of the Pageant before these formidable women began condemning it. “I've got a personal favour,” he said, “to beg of you three ladies,” and he made a gallant little bow in the direction of Angela whom he had only met once or twice before, and of whose cold, chaste, direct glances he was somewhat afraid. “I want you all to make sure you get good seats at the Pageant by buying your tickets early. There are a lot of foreigners coming—several whole parties of them from Germany—and it won't look nice if the front rows are vacant. The Mayor has been saving the front rows for the leading ladies of the town. He has not let his agent sell one ticket for those.”

At this reference to the Mayor's “agent,” Mary, who was sitting next to old Mr. Beere, hesitated not to lift up her voice. “It isn't whether you approve,” she said eagerly and with a heightened colour, “or disapprove, of the thing as a whole. It's simply whether you would care to be entirely absent from something that's likely to be . . . quite an historical event in the life of ... of everybody here.”

Euphemia glanced quickly at her, as she accepted a gold-bordered plate from the dreamy Lily. “Only too historical,” she thought, “in your life, my unhappy darling.” But she said to Miss Fell—"I think perhaps Mary is right, Barbara. We all owe a duty to Glastonbury, and whatever we may personally think of our new Mcyor and his method?, we must ;,d::;:: l\izi lue man has the place very much at heart.**

'There won't be anything Romish aboji it. will there?" *aiJ Miss Fell.

“/ can answer for that,” cried Barter hastily. "Oh. no! Our fear at first was that, in his Evangelical simplicity, ilr. Ge:r;d might be laughed at by some of our cleverer church people. But

the Vicar has been talking to him and has made him see-------**

He stopped abruptly, anxious not to overdo his argument and also, it must be confessed, a little puzzled how to round off this imaginary conversation.

The sun was sinking now and through the open windows floating lightly and gently across the Ruins, came the fragrance of many hayfields. Uncut as yet, the grass had become tall and feathery, and mingled with its vague aroma was a foretaste of something far more intimately sweet, the first breath of budding honeysuckle and dog-roses. Angela Beere—beneath that calm white bosom in the low-cut light-blue frock, under that quiet forehead with the fair hair parted so smoothly—was thinking just then very strange thoughts. She had recently met Persephone, for the first time after a long interval, and the attraction of that equivocal creature had grown upon her night by night, since she had talked with her, into something like a feverish obsession. It had been difficult for her to behave adequately, even politely, in Persephone's presence, so troubling had the girl's personality been. She had wanted to< run away from her; she had wanted to toss herself tempestuously, distractedly, into her new friend's arms! “Did she like me,” she was thinking now, “did I look well? What did she mean by talking to me as she did, if she didn't want me for a friend? When she said that about life being so difficult, and the love of men being so gross and brutal, and it being so hard to find a person you could love whole-heartedly, did I make her understand how I sympathised?”

“There's going to be a bad strike in this town,” announced Mr. Barter, “if those Crow people aren't careful. You'd better give your cousin a hint, Mary. He wouldn't take my advice.” He paused and looked at old Mr. Beere, anxious to make the lawyer believe that it was over a pure point of industrial politics that he had quarrelled with his late employer.

Mr. Beere, however, as he ate his cullets at once greedily and daintily with his old wrinkled face close to his plate, was thinking to himself—"It's astonishing how Crow could put up with this fellow so long. He's an interloper. He's an intriguer. He's thoroughly shifty. I hope he doesn't take a fancy to Angela. No doubt he was feathering his nest in some scurvy way when Crow kicked him out.9''

“Who's this Capporelli they're talking so much about in the Gazette?” enquired Miss Euphemia Drew.

Since no one else seemed inclined to reply Mary began explaining to her friend how the person in question was one of the famous old French clowns of thirty years ago. “He's retired for a long time,” she said. “But he comes back occasionally for things of this sort. He's had an unhappy life. His wife ran away with a Chinaman. Cousin John told Geard about him. He took me to see him at one of the rehearsals. He's acting Dagonet in their play.”

“Acting who, my dear?” enquired Miss Bibby.

“Dagonet, Miss Fell, King Arthur's Fool.”

Barbara turned to Mr. Barter. “I thought you said that this performance was an Evangelical affair, something like Pilgrim's Progress?”

Old Mr. Beere lifted up his head. “I expect 'tis pretty well what the boys and girls like best,” he said. “A little incense and a lot of kissing.”

“It cannot of course be true, Mr. Barter,” threw in Miss Drew, “what dear old Wollop told me yesterday, when I talked to him at that cage he's always shut up in?”

“It's true, Madam,” threw in Mr. Beere with a humorous grimace. “You can count on it's being true if Wollop said it.”

But Miss Drew shook her head. “What he said was that the part of our Saviour was going to be played by that shabby Welshman who's looking after old Jones' shop.” ^

“Mr. Evans is a queer bird to look at,” said Tom Barter gravely, catching the eye of Lily as he spoke, and giving her one of those lightning-quick recognisanl glances of his that girls always understood and responded to. “but he was at Oxford, he tells me. He certainly knows more about the historv of this place than anyone else.”

"But to act the part of Our Lord-------' * reiterated Miss Drew.

“It has always struck me as strange that anyone could do it. even in those old Miracle Plays; but now—and with this French ckmn you talk of-------”

But Mr. Barter's mind had already wandered some distance from Paul Capporelli. He answered vaguely that he felt sure Miss Drew would find nothing objectionable in the Pageant. He thought to himself, "I've been a fool to tie myself up with that designing little bitch at the Pilgrims'. I must edge out of that I must give her the go-by. She's begun to rate her bloody virtue a trifle too high. I wronder if Lily would------- But of course

there's her sister! That's what has always stopped me. But by God she's a beautiful girl—yes! and a sensible girl too." And the incorrigible imagination of Mr. Barter began calling up such enticing and seductive images that when the real Lily, in her puritanical black dress and apron, came in again, the sight of her gave him quite a shock. She had re-assumed her normal attire with a too-bewildering rapidity!

The dinner drew to its end at last. Lily was now taking the cheese-plates away and placing before the guests Miss Drew's best set of Dresden fruit-plates. The Meissen coffee-cups too were brought in and a silver pot that had belonged to her grandmother. She had even instructed Mary to buy a box of cigarettes for the close of the meal and Mary—knowing the taste of her friend Tom—had bought some first-rate Virginian ones. The conversation began to revolve round the enigmatic figure of the new Mayor*

“Young Robert Stilly at the Bank,” said Lawyer Beere, “tells me the fellow's spent thousands on this affair. I should think his family must be feeling it”

Mr. Barter hastened to bring forward an aspect of Mr. Geard that had nothing to do with the expenditure of money. His reward for leaving Philip bit at his conscience like a maggot at a rosy-cheeked apple. “He talks of Our Lord,” he remarked, “as if He were standing close beside him.”

“The man's always smelt of drink when I've been close behind him,” said Barbara Fell.

“Rogers tells me,” said Miss Drew, “that he's been seen making faces at that poor slobbering boy who always stands on the pavement outside the Pilgrims'.”

“I don't think,” threw in Barter, “that Louie got that story quite right. The version I've heard”—and he glanced at Mary, for his informant had been none other than John—“is that he made that boy understand him by signs, and that he always stops when he passes him and that------”

Mary interrupted. “I believe he's got some weird nervous sympathy . . . mind you I don't like him . . . there's something unpleasant about him . . . something frightening . . . but from all I hear he has some nervous peculiarity which makes him imitate every infirmity he meets. That must have been what Louie meant. He must act idiotically whenever he talks to that idiot.”

“All I can say is,” said Miss Bibby, “it's an outrage for a town like ours to have a Mayor who's not responsible for his actions.”

“He's a better doctor than I am in such cases,” muttered her brother crustily.

“Hear how you talk, Manny!” the lady cried. “Anyone would think you were one of his converts, /'ve heard he drinks at the pubs with the worst characters in the town. And they say that last bank holiday he got so drunk at the Legge woman's party that he took that sick niece of hers—Manny goes to see her— she's got some frightful disease—on his knees.”

“I'd be ashamed to talk like that, Barbara!”

Everyone looked at Dr. Fell. He had spoken in a low voice, but with bitter distinctness.

Miss Drew intervened- “We're all of us talking scandal, I'm afraid,” she said. “You're right to rebuke us, Doctor. What do you think about it, Mr. Beere?”

Mr. Beere looked up from his grapes. “Stilly thinks the fellow's mad,” he said. “He's been spending money like water this last couple of months.”

Charles Montagu Fell thought to himself—“If it wasn't for my Mary here, and some of those young girls who come to my Clinic, I swear I'd take those tablets arid er.d it.” Hv :::.>hed his coffee in a gulp and there came over him. as h? t ut ri:v ts::iDtv cup down, a sensation that he had been suffer;: i^ iron: several times lately, a sensation as if his life i\ere inervi' running on by the mechanism wound up within it. while its Laz.ru :i? *ouL its meaning had fled somewhere else and he had ur.iv to er. cut in a loud voice: “But it's all husks and hollo wr.ess! But it's ail worm-rot and dust!” and it would crumble to pieces. . . . The conversation drifted on now to an uneventful exchange of local gossip.

While Miss Drew's dinner-party ebbed thus to its lame and impotent conclusion, Mr. Philip Crow emerged from the drive gate of The Elms to inspect the appearance of the weather.