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    “I've been wanting all the time to ask you, Mary,” he recommenced, “whether you remember that day we couldn't get the boat past the dam—the dam between the big river and the little river? You said just now that you'd never been made love to. Why! my dear, I've had a feeling of longing to see you again all my life since that day that I hugged you and so on in the bottom of that boat. Do you remember that too, the way the boat leaked, and how fishy it smelt and the way I held you?” The queer thing was that once more, even as he said these words, the image of the boy Tom Barter rose up.
    Mary frowned, struggling desperately to evoke the scene he described. She remembered the day; she remembered the difficulty with the dam; she remembered his pleasure as they leant over the rowlocks to watch the fish; she remembered her grandfather's anger when they came home; she remembered with a peculiar sweet sort of shame having asked him various questions; but the one thing she had completely forgotten was his having hugged her “and so on.” A rather sad smile flickered across her face, a smile that she gave way to because her face was invisible to him. “You're sure you remembered right which little girl it was, John,” she said, “that you hugged that day?”
    Her words arrested his attention. He could not tell whether she was mischievous or grave because he could not see her face. “You mustn't tease me like that, Mary,” he said. “You never once teased me in those days and I never once teased you. There's no need for us to be ashamed of being serious now any more than then.”
    He noticed that one of her hands began to- pluck at the grass by her side but she made no reply to his words. “What do you remember, Mary,” he said, “about that day at the dam?”
    The silence that followed his words was like the silence of a field at the bottom of a mountain-valley, when the setting sun touches the flanks of a herd of feeding cattle.
    Mary's thoughts were like a rain of bitterness and a dew of sweetness gathered in the hollows of a tree-root. A brimming over from them all would have escaped and vanished if she had tried to express them in any sort of speech. The shame of those questions she had asked of little Johnny Crow was a sweet shame. That she had forgotten what he remembered was bitter to her. Could he be inventing? Could it really have been another little girl in another boat? How could she have forgotten whatever it was he did to her? “I must have been an imbecile/' she said to herself. ”If he were to hug me now, and so on, I should not forget!"
    His voice continued to murmur on over her head; and what was this? His wrists were under her armpits and his hands covered her breasts. He was holding them very still; but her right breast was beneath one of his hands and her left breast was beneath the other. That up-flowing wave which she had fch before seemed now to encounter a down-flowing wave. Every conscious nerve of her body seemed to be responding to his hands. Her jacket and her dress intervened, or he would have felt her iieart beating. He probably did feel it beating! Her mind wandered for a second to the secluded drawing-room of Miss Euphemia Drew in the Abbey House at Glastonbury. Under the pressure of his hands she shut her eyes and leaning back in complete relaxation against his knees she gave herself up %o an inner vision of the Abbey Ruins through those great windows. How often bad she sat there in the late afternoon light in profound unhappincss watching the rooks gather about the tall elms and the shadow of the great, mutilated tower arch grow longer and longer upon flic smooth grass! How she had come to hate Glastonbury and hate the Ruins and above all hate the legend of the Grail! Tom Bailor agreed with her in all this. That had been the secret of her friendship with Tom. That and his having come from North-wold. “Mary—there's a rabbit in the asparagus-bed! Mary, the ducks are in