, with her wings beaten, with her white face and haggard
eyes, he saw her as a flying thing tracked down and trampled under the
feet of the pursuer. He saw it in one flash as he stood there holding
Milly's hand.

Milly's face had no significance for him. He didn't see it. When at last
he looked at her his eyes questioned her, they demanded an account from
her of what he saw.

For Agatha Milly's face, prepared as it was for leave-taking, remained
charged with meaning; it refused to divest itself of reproach and of the
incredulity that challenged her. Agatha rose to it.

"You're not going, Milly, just because he's come? You needn't."

Milly _was_ going.

He rose to it also.

If Mrs. Powell _would_ go like that--in that distressing way--she must
at least let him walk back with her. Agatha wouldn't mind. He hadn't
seen Mrs. Powell for ages.

He had risen to such a height that Milly was bewildered by him. She let
him walk back with her to the Farm and a little way beyond it. Agatha
said good-bye to Milly at the garden gate and watched them go. Then she
went up into her own room.

He was gone so long that she thought he was never coming back again. She
did not want him to come back just yet, but she knew that she was not
afraid to see him. It did not occur to her to wonder why in spite of her
message he had come, nor why he had come by an earlier train than
usual; she supposed that he must have started before her message could
have reached him. All that, his coming or his not coming, mattered so
little now.

For now the whole marvellous thing was clear to her. She knew the secret
of the gift. She saw luminously, almost transparently, the way it
worked. Milly had shown her. Milly knew; Milly had seen; she had put her
finger on the flaw.

It was not fear, Milly had been right there too. Until the moment when
Harding Powell had begun to get at her Agatha had never known what fear
felt like. It was the strain of mortality in her love for Rodney; the
hidden thing, unforeseen and unacknowledged, working its work in the
darkness. It had been there all the time, undermining her secret, sacred
places. It had made the first breach through which the fear that was
not _her_ fear had entered. She could tell the very moment when it
happened.

She had blamed poor little Milly, but it was the flaw, the flaw that had
given their deadly point to Milly's interference and Harding's
importunity. But for the flaw they could not have