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were best kept separate! But this thought vanished as quickly as it came and both the man and the woman instinctively dropped the subject.
    They dropped it without any feeling at all on his part and on hers only a faint obscure sense that she would have to Confess sooner or later that this boy was now living at Glastonbury. Then they plunged into the deep pool together now with their eyes, their minds, and their souls.
    There are few mill-ponds like Harrod's in all Norfolk and the sensation which these two returning natives got from looking into its depths was unforgettable by both of them. On its outer rim the water was of a pale, neutral colour, a sort of ashen grey, but as the eye moved from circumference to centre it got darker and darker; a faint bluish tinge mingled there with the grey and there appeared a sort of mysterious luminosity as if there had been a subterranean light at the bottom of the pool.
    But what a thing it was to see those great fish, one after another, rise up slowly from the unseen depths, mount to the surface as if they were going to breathe the air, and then, with a reversion of their slow ellipse, turn back towards the depths again!
    To the girl this sight was purely disinterested—just objectively arresting like a flight of beautiful swallows—but to John, with his boyish memory of fishing-rods and predatory pursuit, there was a spasm of possessiveness in it, intense, disturbing, provocative, erotic. The girl satisfied no sense but that of sight as she watched these mysterious water-denizens, first sub-aqueous clouds, then vague darknesses, then noble fish-shapes, rising up and sinking down as if in the performance of some elaborate court ritual, the rules of which were as strict as in some water palace of the Oceanides! But John's grosser nature was not so easily content. A longing seized him, that seemed to carry with it some primordial phallic tremulousness, to grasp with his hands these slippery creatures, to hold them tight, to feel their fins, their scales, their sliding coolness, their electric livingness.
    Making no attempt to analyse why it should have been that the sight of these alien beings, gliding upward, downward, with such intense and yet easy volition, should excite his desire, he moved instinctively behind his companion and slid his arms between her body and the rough fabric of the wall against which they leaned.
    “You're like a cormorant,” she gasped when she recovered her breath" from the disturbance of his protracted embrace.
    “Sorry,” he muttered. “I couldn't help it. Curse it!” he added. “We've got to go, my dear, and quickly too! So say good-bye trout, or chub, or whatever you are! / don't know what you are!”
    He caught her hand and pulled her away, as if he feared she might transform herself into one of those cold, slippery fish-shapes, and vanish forever into the bluish-grey twilight. As he led her off, his last glance revealed a gleaming circle of ripples. “There's a rise!” he murmured. “The only one we've seen, but we must hurry! I daren't look at my watch.”
    The tolling of the bell in the flint tower of the high-roofed Northwold church did indeed begin before they reached the first house of the village. The wind had dropped considerably and the strong sunshine, warming their bodies through all their clothes, combined with the motion of their rapid walk to throw them into a glow of delicious well-being. John felt so well satisfied with what life was offering him that his mind took a leap—unusual for him—into his practical future.
    “I'm going to ask Philip to give me a job in Glastonbury,” he said.
    The girl found a secret vent for the rush of rapturous delight which this nftws brought to her by clutching the flapping edges of • d pu lling them tightly round her neck.
    'Tm a companion to an old woman there called Themia Drew,“ she said eagerly. ”Her house is what they call the Abbey House so I can see the Ruins from my