and had made such fun of the bishop's recent
address on missions to the Portuguese, that the Gervases and Dixons and
all who heard him were quite shocked and annoyed. And, as Mrs. Meyrick of
Lanyravon observed, his black coat was perfectly _green_ with age; so on
the whole the Gervases did not like to invite Mr. Taylor again. As for
the son, nobody cared to have him; Mrs. Dixon, as she said to her
husband, really asked him out of charity.

"I am afraid he seldom gets a real meal at home," she remarked, "so I
thought he would enjoy a good wholesome tea for once in a way. But he is
such an _unsatisfactory_ boy, he would only have one slice of that nice
plain cake, and I couldn't get him to take more than two plums. They were
really quite ripe too, and boys are usually so fond of fruit."

Thus Lucian was forced to spend his holidays chiefly in his own company,
and make the best he could of the ripe peaches on the south wall of the
rectory garden. There was a certain corner where the heat of that hot
August seemed concentrated, reverberated from one wall to the other, and
here he liked to linger of mornings, when the mists were still thick in
the valleys, "mooning," meditating, extending his walk from the quince to
the medlar and back again, beside the moldering walls of mellowed brick.
He was full of a certain wonder and awe, not unmixed with a swell of
strange exultation, and wished more and more to be alone, to think over
that wonderful afternoon within the fort. In spite of himself the
impression was fading; he could not understand that feeling of mad panic
terror that drove him through the thicket and down the steep hillside;
yet, he had experienced so clearly the physical shame and reluctance of
the flesh; he recollected that for a few seconds after his awakening the
sight of his own body had made him shudder and writhe as if it had
suffered some profoundest degradation. He saw before him a vision of two
forms; a faun with tingling and prickling flesh lay expectant in the
sunlight, and there was also the likeness of a miserable shamed boy,
standing with trembling body and shaking, unsteady hands. It was all
confused, a procession of blurred images, now of rapture and ecstasy,
and now of terror and shame, floating in a light that was altogether
phantasmal and unreal. He dared not approach the fort again; he lingered
in the road to Caermaen that passed behind it, but a mile away, and
separated by the wild land and a str