the place where Carfax had fallen.
Bunker was smelling with his head down at the ground. What did the dog
remember? What had Craven meant when he said that Bunker had found the
matchbox?

He stood silently looking down at the Hollow. In his heart now there was
no terror. When, during these last days, he had been fighting his fear
it had always seemed to him that the heart of it lay in this Hollow. He
had always seen the dripping fern, smelt the wet earth, heard the sound
of the mist falling from the trees. Now the earth was clear and hard and
cold. The great white mountains drove higher into the sky, very softly
and gently a few white flakes were falling.

With a great relief, almost a sigh of thank-fulness, he turned back
to the Druids' Stones. There they were--two of them standing upright,
stained with lichen, grey and weather-beaten, one lying flat, hollowed
a little in the centre. The ferns stood above them and the bare branches
of the trees crossed in strange shapes against the sky.

Here, too, there was a peaceful, restful silence. No more was God in
these quiet stones than He had been in that noisy theatrical Revival
Meeting--Lawrence was wrong. Those old religions were dead. No more
could the Greek Gods pass smiling into the temples of their worshippers,
no more Wodin, Thor and the rest may demand their bloody sacrifice.

These old stones are dead. The Gods are dead--but God? . . .

He stayed there for a while and the snow fell more heavily. The golden
light had faded, the high white clouds had swallowed the blue. There
would soon be storm.

In the wood--strangest of ironies--there had been peace.

Now he started down the road again and was conscious, as the wood
slipped back into distance, of some vague alarm.

3

The world was now rapidly transformed. There had been promised a blaze
of glory, but the sun, red and angry, had been drowned by the thick
grey clouds that now flooded the air--dimly seen for an instant outlined
against the grey--then suddenly non-existent, leaving a world like a
piece of crumpled paper white and dark to all its boundaries.

The snow fell now more swiftly but always gently, imperturbably--almost
it might seem with the whispering intention of some important message.

Olva was intensely cold. He buttoned his coat tightly up to his ears,
but nevertheless the air was so biting that it hurt. Bunker, with his
head down, drove against the snow that was coming now ever more thic