She had got away. But now, too late, she realized that she had left Hilary behind. What would he think, when she didn’t come up to the room? He would go through the house then, searching for her, and finally he would hear from somebody that she had run away, and then he would worry. She should have let him know why she was going. Now there was no way to reach him at all. That was what panic did to you. You didn’t think. You did the first mad, desperate thing that occurred to you, and then it was too late. But Hilary couldn’t help her now, because she could not throw her arms round him and beg to stay with him at Nuns Farthing forever.

All the way to Glastonbury in the jerking, lumbering bus, she wondered about Hilary and what would become of him without her, and how she could ever get back to him now. In a daze she alighted in the little square of the old gray town and stood a moment holding her dressing-case and wondering what to do next. She turned instinctively under the arch of the gatehouse, paid sixpence at the turnstile, and went into the abbey ruin. Inevitably the sheer, heartcatching beauty of the place struck through her preoccupation, and brought her up short on the path, humbled and comforted at the same time by its ravished splendor.

Warm sunlight gilded the green aisles open to the sky, the exquisite broken arches cast short midday shadows on the grass. Here Joseph of Arimathea came, when he had buried Christ, and built a little homely church of thatch and reeds to house the Grail. Here St. Patrick taught the youthful St. Benignus, and St. Augustine came on a visit, bringing the black Benedictine habit. Here St. Dunstan spent his young days, and when his bones came back from Canterbury for burial, while the procession was yet a mile from the abbey the bells burst into a joyous peal of their own accord to welcome him home again. Here, in the new Norman church with its round stone arches, Henry II and his queen beheld with reverence the giant bones of Arthur and the golden hair of Guinevere, whose coffin had been placed not at the king’s side but at his feet, as became an unfaithful wife and the sore conscience of her lover Lancelot. Here the wanton cruelty of the Dissolution fell on an honest, aged abbot, and after pillage and blasphemy the deserted abbey was left to crumble away, while cartloads of its wrought stone went to mend the cottages and pigstys of the peasantry.