rmhouse near the Lizard; and
they spent a very delightful month bathing, golfing, cliff-climbing,
cream-eating, fishing, sailing, and talking. Avery and Stewart also did
a certain amount of work on the first number of The Oxford
Looking-Glass, work which Hazlewood amused himself by pulling to pieces.

"I'm doing an article for the O.L.G. on Cornwall," Avery announced one
evening.

"What, a sort of potted guide?" Hazlewood asked.

Maurice made haste to repudiate the suggestion.

"No, no; it's an article on the uncanny place influence of Cornwall."

"I think half of that uncanniness is due to the odd names hereabouts,"
Castleton observed. "The sign-posts are like incantations."

"Much more than that," Avery earnestly assured him. "It really affects
me profoundly sometimes."

Hazlewood laughed.

"Oh, Maurice, not profoundly. You'll never be affected profoundly by
anything," he prophesied.

Maurice clicked his thumbs impatiently.

"You always know all about everybody and me in particular, Guy, but
though, as you're aware, I'm a profound materialist----"

"Maurice is plumbing the lead to-night," Hazlewood interrupted, with a
laugh. "He'll soon transcend all human thought."

"Here in Cornwall," Maurice pursued, undaunted, "I really am affected
sometimes with a sort of horror of the unknown. You'll all rag me, and
you can, but though I've enjoyed myself frightfully, I don't think I
shall ever come to Cornwall again."

With this announcement he puffed defiance from his pipe.

"Shut up, Maurice!" Hazlewood chaffed. "You've been reading Cornish
novelists--the sort of people who write about over-emotionalized young
men and women acting to the moon in hut-circles or dancing with their
own melodramatic Psyches on the top of a cromlech."

"Do you believe in presentiments, Guy?" Michael broke in suddenly.

"Of course I do," said Hazlewood. "And I'd believe in the inherent
weirdness of Cornwall, if people in books didn't always go there to
solve their problems and if Maurice weren't always so facile with the
right emotion at the right moment."

"I've got a presentiment to-night," said Michael, and not wishing to say
more just then, though he had been compelled against his will to admit
as much, he left the rest of the party, and went up to his room.

Outside the tamarisks lisped at intervals in a faint wind that rose in
small puffs and died away in long sighs. Was it a presentiment he felt,
or was it merely thunde