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company in that crowded graveyard. Mary's parents were gone. Persephprje's parents were gone. John had scarcely known his parents. And not one of them lay in that place to warm the bones of the old man! Till she herself was brought there he must lie by himself. Their mother had died in a Swiss sanitarium and had been buried out there. Yes, Cousin John was right when he said she had been “busy” in those days. As she stared now at her rebellious niece in a sort of humorous helplessness all that old imbroglio of tragic difficulties patterned itself before her mind's eye. The Crow family always had had a curious vein of gross, drastic common sense; and when her quarrels with her father reached an intolerable point she had simply cut the knot by leaving him alone and going to live with Philip. Thirty years ago she had gone to Philip, when this proud man was ' a mere boy, beginning his life at Glastonbury. She had achieved this separation with a secretive suddenness that puzzled everyone who knew her; and it flashed upon her mind now that something of this blind animal-like obstinacy had lodged itself in Mary. “Better let her go,” she thought. “I don't blame her for being attracted to this trampish fellow. The extreme opposite of Philip he is; and that's enough for Mary. I don't care if she does fall in love with him. Father did his best to shut me up and I'm not going to play that game with any other woman.”
    Mary thought, “Dear old Aunt Elizabeth! She's got that queer wrinkle in her cheeks at this moment which always means she's at war with Philip. She's glad I'm going off with John—just glad.”
    The driver thought, “That young fellow will play upsidaisy with that young lady, soon as they're out of sight! He'll do it, sure enough. Look at's eyes all gimletting through the lass. He'll eat her up, I shouldn't wonder.”
    John Crow thought, “I'll take her to Harrod's Mill to see those big fish again. Yes, yes, I hugged her at the bottom of the boat on the 'little river' when she was eight and I was ten. Yes, I did! It was a Sunday afternoon I did that. It was drowsy that day; sunny and drowsy. I had rhubarb tart that day with a lot of cream. We went to Harrod's Mill. We left the boat at the dam. We couldn't get it over the dam. There were unripe blackberries round the dam that day.” Then all of a sudden a different figure from Mary's rose up in his mind. “I believe it was Tom at the/: bottom of the boat,” he thought, “and not Mary at all!”
    Such were the thoughts of four human skulls al that moment; but only to one mood out of all these did the great maternal soul of the Earth respond and that was to a sudden exultant sense of peace and deliciousness in Mary's virginal breasts. Her conscious thoughts were all with Aunt Elizabeth and how thai brave woman would deal with Philip's anger; but as she stepped over to John's side and kissed her hand at the departing car something seemed to stir within her like a warm wave that was at once fire, air and water and it shivered up from the centre of her being to the tips of her breasts.
    As soon as the car was out of sight John and Mary glanced at each other with unembarrassed satisfaction.
    “I was puzzling in my mind ever since you all overtook me howT was going to get you to myself, but now that I've got you,” said John, “I don't care what we do or where we go.”
    “I care very much because I want to escape from everyone but you.”
    “Well, then! The first thing to think of is to find something to eat. Let's buy some bread and cheese at that Inn over there and see if they'll let us carry away a flask of port wine.”
    They went into the little hostelry and had no difficulty in obtaining exactly what he had visualised. The Inn lacked a signboard and John asked the girl behind the bar what its name was. “Name?” said the girl with that East Anglian rising inflexion that seemed to mount up to the last word of the sentence as if in a kind of optimistic