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By Root 936 0

put her hand on its rim and felt again the rough encrusted surface and the strange warmth in it. She drew her hand up on to the squares, trying to tell by the feel which picture she was touching. Toby would not come. Should she carry out the plan herself? She could not do it alone, and in any case her desire to do it had vanished. The enterprise now seemed as cheap to her as it would shortly seem to the readers of the sensational press: at best funny in a vulgar way, at worst thoroughly nasty. Dora's heart swelled with remorse and rage. Why did Noel have to come here? The story would 'come out' in any case, but Noel's presence on the spot would ensure that it would be misreported in thoroughly picturesque detail. Dora knew what Noel could make of a story. She knew too the evasive mockery with which Noel would meet any plea for silence. More obscurely she grieved that Noel had been foolish enough to pursue and intrude in a way which seemed now to make it impossible for her to regard him as a place to escape to. In London his judgement of Imber had eased her heart. Here it was he who was under judgement.

But her more immediate thoughts concerned the bell. It was too late now to hope to keep everything dark. Was there any way of making the revelation less absurd, less damaging to Imber? Nick had told the story as if the projected miracle were the work of someone within the community; and this would probably be how it would appear: a crackbrained stratagem arising out of some schism in a society of lunatics. Yet it was she, and she only, who was responsible. How could that be made clear? Should she make a statement to the press? How did one make a statement to the press? She turned to the bell for help.

She pressed her palm gently against it as if supplicating. The bell moved very slightly. She steadied it and stood with both her hands upon it. Attending to it, she was struck again by the marvel of its resurrection and she felt reverence for it, almost love. When she thought how she had drawn it out of the lake and lifted it back into its own airy element she was amazed and felt suddenly unworthy. How could the great bell have suffered her to drag it here so unceremoniously and make it begin its new life in an out-house? She should not have tampered with it. She ought by rights to be afraid of it. She was afraid of it. She took her hands off it abruptly.

The hissing of the rain continued all round her, very soft, making an artificial silence more deep than real silence could be. The floor of the barn about her feet was sticky with the water that was still steadily dripping from her garments. Dora stood tense and listening. She put her ear near to the bell as if she half expected to hear it murmur like a shell that holds the echo of the sea. But from all the sound that lay asleep in that great cone not the faintest sigh was audible. The bell was quiet. Fascinated, Dora knelt down on the ground and thrust her arm inside it. It was black inside and alarmingly like an inhabited cave. Very lightly she touched the great clapper, hanging profoundly still in the interior. The feeling of fear had not left her and she withdrew hastily and switched the torch on. The squat figures faced her from the sloping surface of the bronze, solid, simple, beautiful, absurd, full to the brim with something which was to the artist not an object of speculation or imagination. These scenes had been more real to him than his own childhood and more familiar. He had reported them faithfully. They were familiar to Dora too, as in the light of the electric torch she looked at them again.

When she had walked slowly all round the bell she switched the light off. She was ready to drop with tiredness, chilled and stiff with the rain. It was all too difficult; she must go back to bed. But she knew this was impossible. She could not leave things wretchedly like this, unsolved and unmended; she could not leave the bell ambiguously to be the subject of malicious and untrue stories. As if it alone held the solution she could not bring herself to leave it, though