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“You run off and explore, my pretty one!” he said. “I'll deal with the boat.” When she was gone he thought to himself, “It's the way she parts her hair and pulls it back and twists it, that I like so well. Who would have guessed that I'd find her like this the first minute I got to my native land?” He frowned a little and then closed his eyes. Though it was warm enough to be May rather than March, it was too early for that confusing murmur of insects which is the usual background for a hot afternoon. When the rustling of her steps died away an incredible silence descended on the place. The newborn reeds were too young to play with the flowing river. The noon had become afternoon. The larks were silent. The fish had ceased to rise. There were no swallows yet and the few spring flies that hovered over that weedy ditch were safe from attack whether from the firmament above or the firmament below. The only sound that reached his ears was the sound of a faint trickle of water which came from some infinitesimal ledge in the bank above his head and fell down drop by drop into the ditch. Not a breath of wind stirred. Not a leaf-bud quivered. Not a grass-blade swayed. There was only that elfin waterfall and, except for that, the very earth herself seemed to have fallen asleep. “This is Norfolk,” he said to himself, and in that intense, indrawn silence some old atavistic affiliation with fen-ditches and fen-water and fen-peat tugged at his soul and pulled it earthward. And there came to his nostrils, as he lay with his eyes shut, a far-flung, acrid, aromatic smell It was not the smell of mud, or leaf-buds, or grass-roots, or cattle-droppings, or ditch-water. It was not the smell of last night's rain, or of the sleeping south wind. It reached him independent of the eel slime that still clung about the bottom of the boat. It was the smell of East Anglia itself. It was the smell to greet which, on uncounted spring mornings, his Isle-of-Ely ancestors had left their beds and opened their back doors! It was the smell that had come wandering over the water-meadows on afternoons like this, to the drowsy heads of innumerable John Crows, resting from their ploughing with their ale mugs in their blistered hands, and their minds running on ewes and lambs and on bawdy Cambridge taverns! A fleeting thought of what lay before him in Glaston-bury no sooner touched his mind than he flung iL away as Mary had flung the eel's head.

He made a feeble attempt to recall the subtle idea which he had had when he prayed to his mother under the alders, but he could only remember the part about never “competing.” “Compete?” he thought vaguely. “What does 'compete' mean?” At that moment there seemed nothing in the world comparable to allowing sleep to steal through and become one with him, just as this tinkling rivulet he listened to lost itself in the body of this ditch. But all the while, though he kept yielding to these invasions of sleep, he could not give himself up to it to the point of losing his consciousness. Every now and then, when his eyelids still unclosed a little, he saw a drooping willow shoot trailing in the ditch beside him. Its extremity seen through the water was different from the upper part of it seen through the air; and as something in him refused to yield to unconsciousness, he came by degrees to identify himself with this trailing shoot. There was a queer imperative upon him not to sink any deeper into sweet oblivion. There was an imperative upon him to remember his vow about “competing.” This “never competing” became identified with the slow swirl of the ditch stream as it^made tiny ripples round the suspended shoot. He was allowed, he dimly felt, to enjoy his paradisiac lassitude, as long as he, this being who was partly John Crow and partly a willow shoot, kept these ripples in mind. All these phenomena made up a complete world, and in this world he was fulfilling all his moral obligations and fulfilling them with a delicious sense of virtue merely by keeping these ripples in mind; and the drip-drop, drip-drop of the tinkling rivulet at his elbow was the voice of the -meer imperative which he obeyed.

A moor-hen propelling herself in quaint jerks past this willow shoot towards the river was so startled by confronting the face of a man staring with flickering eyelids down into the water that she rose with a scream and flapped off heavily into the rushes. This aroused John, who in a moment forgot altogether the imperative of the tinkling rivulet; and, clutching the edge of the boat with numb sleep-swollen fingers, raised his neck like a turtle and pricked up his ears to listen for his girl's return.

It was under a great ash tree in the centre of a neighbouring field that they finally had their lunch.

“Why didn't you stand up to Philip more if you disliked him so?” 'she asked when their meal was over and they were recalling last night's gathering. His face worked expressively before the words came out in answer, a curious pulse appearing in his cheeks at the corner of his nostrils and a certain twitching round his cheek-bones. It was a facial peculiarity not quite the same as that of Miss Elizabeth Crow; and yet it was evidently a family trait. Touching in the women, and no doubt often a signal of danger in the men, this facial sign, like a well-worn coin, must have frequently, in the last three or four hundred years, gone to Norwich for the fair, gone to Cambridge to buy books and silk dresses* appeared in the depths of old-fashioned looking-glasses, above mahogany chests of drawers, before the pushing open of innumerable ivy-shadowed front-bedroom windows to watch visitors come over the home-meadows. It must often have been the last of all their possessions that they were forced to leave behind, when, like William Crow on this beautiful March day, they lay with six feet of East Anglian clay above them!

It appeared now indeed more emphatically than Mary had ever seen it in any of her relative's faces except once when she had asked her grandfather at breakfast, as he dreamily looked out over that smooth secluded lawn, what the word “whore” meant.

“I'll tell you exactly why!” John Crow cried, seizing a clump of soft moss, just beyond where his overcoat extended, with excited fingers. “It's for a reason that I wouldn't tell anyone in the world but you. It's because I've long ago decided always to yield to my cowardice. I was afraid of Philip the moment I saw him. I hated him; but that's another matter. Something in his personality frightens me. I could have struggled against it and made myself say a lot of things. I thought of plenty of them. But it's become a principle with me to yield to my fear of people. I propitiate them, or I'm silent, or I avoid them.”

Mary looked at him very earnestly.

“Have you ever loved anyone you were afraid of?”

“You mean a woman?”

She nodded.

“I tell you I've never loved anyone; though of course I've made love to endless women. Oh, yes! Yes! It would kill my love to be afraid. Not at once, but by inches and inches. Oh, yes! If I ever got thoroughly afraid of anyone in the end I should stop loving them.”

She lowered her eyes and remained silent for a moment. Then she cried with a kind of quivering fierceness, "I won't have you dare ever to be afraid of me, JohnV

He looked at her sharply. There was a note in her voice that he had not heard before. It was the danger-note of the female, beyond reason, against reason.

“Why not?” he asked.

She turned away her head and looked across the wide, flat meadow at the Wissey bank, making no reply. A soft gust of south wind stirred the lighter branches of the ash above them. The cold, thin, smooth, grey twigs, with their clean, black buds, moved solemnly up and down like classic dancers.

“Shall I be pleased with Glastonbury?” he asked after a pause.

“I believe you'll feel just as I do, John, about Glastonbury. You'll hate the sentimentality that has been spread over everything there, like scented church-lamp oil! You'll hate the visitors. You'll hate the tradesmen catering for the visitors; you'll hate the sickening superstition of the whole thing.”

“I hate it now, quite sufficiently,” he interrupted. “Simply because Philip's there. Oh, I wish------” He became so pensive that

she did not like to break into his thought. “I wish, Mary, that you'd leave Glastonbury and try and find something of ... of the same kind . . . whatever it is . . . that you do . . . somewhere round here.”

She smiled a broad, amused smile, showing all her strong white teeth.

“How funny!” she murmured. “Why, my dearest, I can't do anything! You don't seem to realize that I've only been on my own for a couple of years; and before that I did nothing at all but look after Mother.”

“Where did you live?”

“In Thorpe, near Norwich. Mother's buried in Thorpe. She couldn't leave me anything because she lived on her pension.” Mary's eyes opened very wide as she spoke of her mother. No tears came into them. They just opened very wide, with a curious, self-conscious movement of the facial muscles.

“It was Philip of course who got me the place,” she went on. “Miss Drew is some sort of a connection of Tilly's.” She leaned forward now, and stretching out her hand caught hold of his foot. “John, my dear John,” she said with extreme and childish gravity, “will you really walk all the way to Glastonbury?”

“I shall start very early tomorrow,” he replied, “and I expect I'll see you again in ten days. I suppose it will be all right to send you a postcard when I get there? I shall anyway have a penny left to buy that with.”

Mary jumped to her feet, and gave her skirts a vigorous shake. His question restored to her with a healthy rush her abrupt woman-of-action quality.

“Yes,” she said, “send me a card. Miss Drew, the Abbey House, is the address. You won't forget that? You can think of the Ruins for the Abbey part, and you can think of 'screw' for the rest. 'You,' 'screw,' Drewl” and she laughed uneasily.

John slowly pulled up his legs and got upon his feet. The hard, cautious, furtive look of a tramp was upon his face now. “Will . . • you . . . really . • . be able ... to help me . . . keep body and soul together . . . when I get there?” And then shooting at her a completely impersonal look, as if she were a housemaid hiring him to chop wood, “How often does she pay you?” he asked.

But Mary was totally undisturbed by this revelation of the lower self of her lover. Indeed she looked pleased. “Every month,'7 she replied with shining eyes. ”It's my pocket-money, you know.5'

Her pleasure at the ungentlemanly turn he had given to the conversation brought such a glow to her cheeks and such a smile to her lips that she became for a moment really beautiful. He rushed up to her and caught her in his arms. Long and long did he caress her under that confederate ash tree. “You're a hamadryad—that's what you are!” he kept repeating. “You're a hamadryad!”

Every girl lives so constantly in the imaginative atmosphere of being made love to that even the most ignorant of them is rarely shocked or surprised. It is the material consequences that they dread, not moral remorse or any idea that they are allowing what is wrong. John's way of love-making might, however, have easily palled on a more passionate nature than Mary's; for he was not only profoundly corrupt but extremely egoistic, touching her and holding her in the manner that most excited his own childishly fantastic imagination and never asking himself whether this was what suited her, nor for one second forgetting himself in any rush of tempestuous tenderness. But Mary, as though she really were a hamadryad, who had known the shamelessness of hundreds of whimsical satyrs, treated the whole thing with grave, sweet, indulgent passivity. Something in her kindred nature, some willow-rooted, fen-country perversity, seemed to need just this protracted cerebral courtship to stir the essential coldness of her blood and nerves. One quaint feeling often came to her, in the oddest moments of his “sweet usage,” namely, that he was one of her old, faded, wooden dolls; yes, the most dilapidated and injured of all four which used to belong to her, come to life again, but this time full of queer, hardly human exactions that she would willingly prostitute herself for hours and hours to satisfy, so long as she could hear those wooden joints creak and groan in their joy.

They both knew they were sa/e from interruption. Children of generations of fen-country life, they were well aware how far safer for lovers is the great, wide, flat expanse of grass-meadows, than any thickly grown copse or spinney, where an enemy can easily approach unseen.

Emanations of sympathy were not lacking from the vast, smooth tree, with its upward-clutching branch-ends, though they were of a different kind from those of that aged denizen of Dye's Hole. They both knew well that after the heavy effort of getting the boat back against the current to Alder Dyke, there would be little chance for more than a few kisses before they separated for their unknown future; and this made them loath to cease their play. But the role the ash tree served was to bring to them in the midst of their dalliance with incredible vividness the image of their grandfather. Both of them saw clearly in their mind's eye the well-known head of their grandfather, covered with thick curly hair, “as white as wool,” with his patient servants sitting in a row on the red-leather dining-room chairs and with his life-weary, King-of-Thule eyes in their hollow eye-sockets, lowered over the page, as with his classic-actor's voice beautifully modulated to the occasion, he intoned one of the poet Cowper's hymns.

The language of trees is even more remote from human intelligence than the language of beasts or of birds. What to these lovers, for instance, would the singular syllables “wuther-quotle-glug” have signified?

“It is extraordinary that we should ever have met!” These words, uttered by John in a moment of relaxed gratefulness, struck the attention of that solitary ash tree in Water-ditch Field with what in trees corresponds to human irony. Five times in its life of a hundred and thirty years had the ash tree of Water-ditch Field heard those words uttered by living organisms. An old horse had uttered them in its own fashion when it rubbed its nose against a young companion's polished flanks. An eccentric fisherman had uttered them addressing an exceptionally large chub which he had caught and killed. A mad clergyman had uttered them about a gipsy girl who did not know of his existence. An old maiden lady had uttered them to the spirit of her only lover, dead fifty years before; and finally, but twelve months ago, William Crow himself had uttered them; uttered them in the grateful, attentive and astonished ears of Mr. Geard of Glastonbury!