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This was too much for Cordelia. “If you dare once again,” she cried, “to talk about Mr. Evans to me, I'll begin talking about you and young Mr. Dekker!”

It was Crummie's turn to be outraged now. And she was evidently quite as much astonished as she was hurt. She rose up on the bed, propped herself on the palms of her hands, and stared open-mouthed at the dark girl before her, wThose uncomely features were at that moment rendered almost beautiful by wTralh. “What?” Crummie cried. “What can you mean, Cordelia? Who told you I ever met Sam Dekker—or had anything to do with him? Except at school-treats of course!—and sometimes when I've taken a few cowslips, in cowslip time, for the church—or gone with Red to a cricket match at Street—or maybe at Michaelmas Fair where everybody meets everybody—and if you dare to say Fm sweet on Sam Dekker or have ever spoke to Sam Dekker —except of course as a girl naturally does speak to a clergyman's son when she's helping the clergyman to distribute prizes or to carry those texts around that have those big red roses on them—IVe only one thing to say of you, Cordelia Geard, and that is—you're telling absolute lies!”

At this point Crummie pulled up her legs under her, with the complete abandonment of a very little girl, bent her head till her wavy hair fell in loose wisps and loops upon her lap, and, covering her face with her hands, burst into passionate sobbing.

If Cordelia had intended to use a formidable weapon, she had never expected that it would prove as deadly a one as this. Her unconscious instinct, as often happens with women who want to hurt each other, had gone to the mark quicker and surer than any reasoned attack could have done. In a flash the elder sister recognised the truth. She saw to her confusion how possible it is to live intimately with a person all one's life and at last be absolutely confounded by some revelation as to her secret sexual life.

So Crummie was in love with young Mr. Dekker; really in love; just in the same sort of way as she herself was in love with —but Cordelia pulled her thoughts up with a jerk. That was day dreams and speculations too dear even for herself to dwell upon! Little Crummie! Why, this was nothing less than tragic. Gossip had already whispered to the sisters that young Mr. Dekker had been “keeping company with this Zoylcnd woman out to Splott's Moor.” And in any case a marriage between the child of Johnny Geard—even of a rich Mr. Geard—and the son of the Vicar of St. John's was an unnatural consummation. She laid her embroidery down and went across to her sister's side. “Forgive poor Cordy!” she murmured self-reproachfully. “Of course I know that young Dekker is nothing to you. I was just cross, Crummie darling,”—and she laid her hand caressingly on her sister's head and bent down to kiss her—“your Cordy was just cross. But I'm not cross any more, and you mustn't be cross with me!”

Crummie's cheeks were still wet, but her full red lips parted in a faint smile. “We're a silly pair, Cordy!” she murmured as they kissed each other, and ,she threw her arms tenderly round her sister's neck and drew her close. After a second's tight hug the younger girl swung her legs off the bed and they sat side by side upon the ruffled bed-clothes.

“Better tidy yourself up now, Crummie. Sally will be ringing that bell for tea.”

"And Mr. Evans is coming to tea1/' laughed the other roguishly.

Cordelia moved now to the table and began folding up her embroidery.

“I must go down and put on my coral necklace,” she said to herself, “and brush my hair a bit; but what's the use? If he doesn't like me for myself, he won't care. And if he does he won't care, either!” And then the queer thought came into her head— “If a man wants to marry a girl, when he likes her for her mind alone, does he get any pleasure from kissing her and embracing her?” So deep did this queer and troubling question sink into her consciousness that she let her embroidery lie where it fell, unwrapt in its usual piece of blue tissue paper! She herself sank down on her sewing-chair and stared in front of her. She stared at the particular one of the pictures of “The Four Seasons” which represented Autumn. Quite automatically she read: “We too have Autumns, when our leaves fall loosely through the misty air, and all our good is bound in sheaves, and we stand reaped and bare.” She had read these words in their familiar place on the wall of the sewing-room since she could read at all.

Crummie was now clutching tight in her fingers the midstream of her mass of fragrant hair, pulling it round her white neck and passing the comb, with many little cries at the tangles, through its down-shaken wavy curls. To twist it round her head and stick the hairpins into it was a matter of a second or two. Then she slipped off her dress and bending over the chest of drawers sought leisurely for this and the other garment; weighing, rejecting, appraising, selecting. Hovering there, all in white, with bare arms and bare shoulders, she proceeded to smooth down with indolent outspread fingers the creases of her slip, preparatory to pulling her dress over her head.

Like a patient nun in a courtesan's tiring-room Cordelia watched her, a little twisted smile on her lips. No! Of course Owen Evans couldn't love a person like her. But if he really thought she was “Cymric” in her ideas, and liked her for herself enough to marry her, why! she would marry him.

Crummie was sitting on the bed now, changing her stockings, and if she had looked winsome and alluring before, she looked even more so now.

As Cordelia watched the delicate softness of Crummie's limbs during this lengthy ritual, and the whiteness of her flesh thrown into tender shadows by the ruffled hem of her garment, there did come over the plain girl's mind a faint, flickering spasm of revolt. Why should her own poor knees be so bony and rough-textured? Why beneath her bony knees should her legs be like a pair of broom handles? If God had willed everything from the very Beginning of the World, why had He willed that all this exquisite delight in one's own body—Crummie was at the mirror again now, turning this way and that way, as she tried on her new party dress—should be given to one girl, while another girl felt her body to be a troublesome burden to be carried about? Oh, it didn't depend on having men to admire one, or to embrace one. “It is the feeling” thought poor Cordelia, “of being beautiful to one's own self that matters!”

The younger sister was ready now* “Cordy,” she cried, reluctantly turning her head from the mirror, “aren't you going to change anything?”

But Cordelia, rising to her feet, only gave two contemptuous little pats to her dark hair, only gave a contemptuous shake to ber black skirt, only picked off the front of it a few coloured threads left by her embroidery. Instead of glancing at the mirror, she glanced, over her sister's head, at the coloured representation of Spring, the first of those Four Seasons, hanging on the wall. At the bottom of this picture, which had always been the younger's favourite of all four, was a little card, stuck in the edge of the frame, carrying on its surface a childish sketch of a small girl, done in crude pinks and blues, the hair just an enormous smudge of chrome-yellow, which bore the inscription “Crummie by Crummie, Aged Six.” “Come on,” she said, “let's go down and help Sally.”

The presence of Sally in the house—Mrs. Geard would hardly allow her to cross the threshold of her sacred kitchen—was one of the few tokens of domestic grandeur that had appeared in Cardiff Villa, Street Road, since Johnny Geard's accession to wealth.

And Sally—a daughter of Mrs. Jones of the High Street tea-shop—was anything but a smart or experienced servant. But Cordelia was rather relieved not to be perpetually answering the doorbell; and sometimes, when, in one of her bad moods, she was lying supine on her bed upstairs, she did get a faint, malicious satisfaction in hearing Sally repeat her most difficult lesson— the inhospitable decree, “Not at home.”

“Bloody Johnny,” as the tavern-cronies in Glastonbury loved to call Mr. Geard because of his preachings in the street and his repeated references to the Blood of Christ, was evidently not intending to use William Crow's money for the embellishing of Cardiff Villa either with new paint, or furniture, or plate, or servants! Cordelia wondered now, as they entered the kitchen and found Sally Jones staring mute and awestruck before Mrs. Geard's Dreparations, whether Mr. Evans realized yet how unlikely it ,vas that any large portion of this money would come to her— 3ven if she did marry him. “Never, never, did any man want taking care of more than Mr. Evans does!” she thought. Oddly anough she never thought of her antiquarian suitor as anything but “Mr. Evans.” She had reached the point—no very easy point, considering the ponderousness of the Welshman's second manner!—of calling him Owen. But she never thought of him as Owen . . .

“I really brought Mr. Crow to see you,” said Mr. Evans, referring to John Crow, as they all sat around the tea-tray in the front parlour, “because he's in difficulties.” At the word “difficulties” Megan Geard's mouth closed tight and she glanced furtively at the preposterously big skull of her reckless husband. She had known too well—and only too recently!—what to be “in difficulties” meant.

But Bloody Johnny seemed to have no such memory. He turned his hydrocephalic head on the pivot of his neck with the slow gravity of the ghost in Punch and Judy and gazed at John across the table. “Your grandfather was a good friend to me,” he remarked. “But I served him well. If you'll excuse the word, Mr. Crow, and not think me presumptuous, I believe I can say that I made your grandfather's last years very happy ones.”

John reduced his eyes to two narrow slits. Through these apertures he scrutinised Mr. Geard very closely, giving him the appraising glance of a professional beggar, surveying a new countenance at a well-known back door.

“What I don't think is understood by any of your family, Mr. Crow,” the ex-preacher went on, “is that I regard your grandfather's bequest in the light of a Divine Responsibility.”

At the sound of these surprising words from his host and namesake John Crow's eyes almost closed entirely, while the hereditary twitch in his face became like a tiny jumping-jack under the skin of his lean cheek. “You mean you're going to give the oof back to us, Sir?” he said.

Bloody Johnny was the only person at that table who remained completely at ease under the shock of this rude speech. “Well, Mr. Crow,” he remarked serenely, “not exactly give it back to you, you know, nor lo any of you; not, that is, exactly, as you might say, give it back. But I do intend—and my friend Mr. Evans agrees entirely with my intention—to spend your dear grandfather's gift, or at least the bulk of it, on a purpose in no way connected with myself or with my family.” Mr. Geard's voice raised itself a little as he uttered these final words and his great head seemed to obey an interior command as it swung resolutely round on its pivot What it faced now under this interior command, and John Crow seemed to hear an audible creaking of its machinery as it turned, was the extremely agitated countenance of Megan Geard whose mouth, at the words “with my family” had become a thinly outlined half-circle whose drooping horns were surrounded by twitching wrinkles.

“Mr. Evans thinks,” went on Bloody Johnny, “that it would be wrong of me not to take my wife and my girls, especially my daughter Cordelia, into my confidence, though, as you know, my treasure,”—here he fixed an unwinking gaze upon his wife's wide-open eyes—“I am not one to reveal my designs till they have matured.” The reverberations of these grand words “designs” and “matured” had scarcely died away when Bloody Johnny followed them by a deprecatory murmur, addressed, not to his family but to his God. “I mean,” he added, “till they have been blessed from Above.”

A lack-lustre film formed over John's eyes, and he said to himself, “If this fellow turns out to be a superstitious fool, instead of a hypocritical knave, I shall get nothing from him. There goes my easy job, up in smoke!”

“My relative, Mr. Geard,” said Owen Evans, with a respectful glance at Cordelia, “has come to the conclusion that there are ways of bringing to Glastonbury, by the wise expenditure of a little money, shoals and shoals of pilgrims. They will come from France, from Germany, from Russia. They will flock here in such increasing numbers that Glastonbury will once more rival Rome and Jerusalem as a centre of mystic influence, h only remains for”—at this point, to Cordelia's complete astonishments though she thought, as she had said to Cninimie, that she ''knew Mr. Evans through and through,“ his gaze dropped from her attentive eyes and sank to her clasped hands which rested on the table, while his voice became broken, spasmodic, intense—”for some . . . for some . . . for some event to happen . . . and a new Religion . . . different . . . from any that's ever been . . . wTill . . . will . . . will make a crack in the world!" They all turned their eyes upon his contorted face; all except Crummie who glanced wonderingly at her sister.

“What do you mean by ca crack in the world'?” enquired John Crow, the film of hopelessness passing from his lineaments and his whole attention aroused.

“A crack in Cause-and-Effeet,” cried Owen Evans, his voice rising; “a crack in the Laws of Nature, a crack in Matter! And Something will break out, through that crack, that will take away our torment!”

The word “torment” was uttered from such twisted lips that it was as if it really came from a spirit in hell and Cordelia Geard's heart began to beat. The others, except the profane John, averted their eyes, as if from some apparition that was as obscene as it was tragic. But as Owen Evans slowly recovered himself, the girl unclasped her hands and very lightly, and wTith a gesture that no gentlewoman in the land could have surpassed for dignity and grace, laid her fingers on the sleeve of his coat.

John, who was intently watching Mr. Evans, could not decide whether the man even noticed this movement of the devoted girl, whose fingers were withdrawn as soon as her friend was master of himself again, but to the sly scrutiny of the “run-down adventurer” the incident was very significant. “He's not out for her money,” he thought, “but he's certainly out of her depth. I must get at the fellow's secret. He's got some devilish spike sticking into his midriff; but what it is the Lord only knows!”