“Which of the many possible Causes would that be?”

“The Loyalists, obviously. Thinking as he does.”

“Well—at least your name hasn’t been mentioned. And won’t be, if you have enough sense to keep your mouth shut.”

“Thanks, Frank. You’re sweet.”

“That’s what I’m beginning to be afraid of.”

Being sweet might mean being a gull, but there were compensations. Francis was invited by his Aunt Prudence Glasson to spend a fortnight at St. Columb Hall, the Glasson family seat, when the Oxford term ended. He seemed, said Aunt Prudence, to have become a great chum of Ismay’s, and they would be delighted to welcome him, as it was such a long time since he had stayed at nearby Chegwidden. At that time, Francis remembered, the Glassons had not troubled to ask him to visit them, though Aunt Prudence was his father’s sister, and her pestilent younger children had seen a great deal of him and found him mockable. But he had no mind for resentment; the thought of having Ismay under his eye for two weeks, without Charlie and the pleasures of Oxford to distract her, was irresistible.

The horrible children had become more tolerable since last he saw them. The two girls, Isabel and Amabel, were lumpy, fattish schoolgirls, who blushed painfully if he spoke to them and giggled and squirmed when he reminded them of the dead adder in his bed. Their older brother, Roderick, who was seventeen, was at this stage very much a product of Winchester, and seemed to have become a Civil Servant without ever having been a youth; but he was not seen much, as he spent a lot of time winding himself up for a scholarship examination that lay some time in the future. Ismay alone retained any of the wildness he had associated with his Glasson cousins.

She was offhand and dismissive with her mother, and contradicted her father on principle. The older Roderick Glasson, it is true, provoked contradiction; he was of the same political stripe as Uncle Arthur Cornish—that is to say, his Toryism was a cautious echo of an earlier day—and though he never quite sank to saying that he didn’t know what things were coming to, he used the word “nowadays” frequently in a way that showed he expected nothing from a world gone mad, a world that had forgotten the great days before 1914. This extended even to female beauty.

“You should have seen your mother when your father married her,” he said to Francis. “An absolute stunner. There aren’t any women like that now. They’ve broken the mould.”

“If he had seen his mother when his father married her,” said Ismay, “it would have been rather a scandal, wouldn’t it?”

“Ismay, darling, don’t catch Daddy up on everything he says,” said Aunt Prudence, and a familiar wrangle was renewed.

“Well, why can’t people say what they mean, and not simply waffle?”

“You know perfectly well what I meant, but you can’t resist any opportunity to show how clever you’ve become at Oxford.”

“If you didn’t want me to become clever at Oxford, you shouldn’t have nagged me to go for that miserable, inadequate scholarship. I could have stayed at home and studied stupidity. That would have had the advantage of being cheap.”

“As I suppose you are too old to be sent from the table, Ismay, I have no recourse but to leave it myself. Francis, would you like a cigar?”

“We’ve finished anyway, and I wish you wouldn’t take refuge in Christian-martyring, Daddy. It isn’t argument.”

“I do so well remember your mother’s wedding,” said Aunt Prudence, the peacemaker. “But Francis, didn’t you have an older brother? I seem to remember a letter from Switzerland, from your father.”

“There was an older brother, also Francis, but he died.”

It was the memory of that older Francis that softened the opinions of the living Francis about Ismay and her parents. In a world that contained such secrets as the Looner, these disputes seemed trivial. What did Wordsworth call it? The still, sad music of humanity—to chasten and subdue? Something like that. The underlying, deep grief of things. One must try to understand, to overlook sharp edges. Of course he was on Ismay’s side, but certainly not as a combatant. Her parents were dull and tedious, and she was too young, too radiant and full of life, to have learned to be patient. Probably she had never had to be patient about anything. Without knowing it, Francis’s view of family life was much like that of Shakespeare; parents, unless they happened to be stars like King Lear, were minor roles, obstructive, comic, and not to be too much heeded. Only Coriolanus paid attention to his mother, and look what happened to him!

If Shakespeare was not present in his mind, the Grail legend had returned to it in full force. Once again he was on the holy ground of Cornwall, and the pedal-point of his passion for Ismay was the story of Tristan and Iseult, and another more primitive and magical tale.

A passion it certainly was. He was twenty-four years old, so he did not moon and brood like a boy, but he ached for Ismay, and longed to see her happy and pleased with life. He had the lover’s unjustified belief that love begets love. It was impossible that he should love Ismay so much without her loving him by infection. He did not think ill of himself; he did not consider himself deficient, compared with other young men. But faced with the splendour of Ismay he could only hope that she might let him serve her, devote his life to her and whatever she wanted.

Ismay knew all of this, and therefore it was perhaps surprising that she let him persuade her to spend a day with him at Tintagel. She tormented him, of course. Shouldn’t they take Isabel and Amabel, who did not get many outings; they mustn’t be selfish, must they? But it was Francis’s intention, on this occasion, to be wholly selfish.

They had a fine day for their picnic, though as it was Cornwall it was certainly not a dry day. Ismay had never been to Tintagel, and Francis held forth about its history: the castle of the Black Prince, and before that the monastic community that had gathered around the hermitage of St. Juliot, and, far back in the mists, Arthur, that mysterious fifth-century figure who might have been the last preserver of Roman order and Roman culture in a Britain overrun by savage northerners, or—even better—have been the mighty figure of Welsh legend.

“Did he live here?” said Ismay, who seemed to be yielding a little to the nature of the story and the spirit of the place.

“Born here, and strangely begotten here.”

“Why strangely?”

“His mother was a wonderfully beautiful princess, who was wife to the Duke of Cornwall. Her name was Ygraine. A very great Celtic chieftain, Uther Pendragon, saw her and desired her and could not rest until he had possessed her. So he took counsel of the magician Merlin, and Merlin surrounded this castle with a magical spell, so that when her husband was absent Uther Pendragon was able to come to her in her husband’s guise, and it was here that he begot the marvellous child who grew to be Arthur.”

“Didn’t the Duke ever find out?”

“The Duke had no luck; he was killed and cuckolded the same night, though not by the same man. Arthur was brought up by another knight, Sir Ector, and educated by Merlin.”

“Lucky lad.”

“Yes. Didn’t you ever learn any of this at school? You, a Cornish girl—a Cornish princess.”

“My school thought mythology meant Greeks.”

“Not a patch on the great Northern and Celtic stuff.”

Thus Francis began the casting of a spell that had been long working in his mind, and with such success that Ismay yielded to it, becoming tenderer and more compliant than he had ever known her, until at last on a motor rug in the embrace of what might have been part of the Black Prince’s castle, or one of the hermitages of the companions of St. Juliot, or just possibly a remnant of that castle of Duke Gorlois (who figures ignominiously in legend as cuckolds must) in which Arthur was begotten, he possessed Ismay, and it seemed to him that the world could never have been so splendid, or blessing so perfect, since the days of the great legend.