t mean that you should come, that you should ever come
again, Rodney."

He smiled.

"So you went back on me, did you?"

"If you call it going back."

She longed for him to see.

"That was only because you were frightened," he said.

He turned from her and paced the room uneasily, as if he saw. Presently
he drew up by the hearth and stood there for a moment, puzzling it out;
and she thought that he had seen.

He hadn't. He faced her with a smile again.

"But it was no good, dear, was it? As if I wouldn't know what it meant.
You wouldn't have done it if you hadn't been ill. You lost your nerve.
No wonder, with those Powells preying on you, body and soul, for weeks."

"No, Rodney, no. I didn't _want_ you to come back. And I think--now--it
would be better if you didn't stay."

It seemed to her now that perhaps he had seen and was fighting what he
saw.

"I'm not going to stay," he said, "I am going--in another hour--to take
Powell away somewhere."

He took it up where she had made him leave it. "Then, Agatha, I shall
come back again. I shall come back--let me see--on Sunday."

She swept that aside.

"Where are you going to take him?"

"To a man I know who'll look after him."

"Oh, Rodney, it'll break Milly's heart."

She had come, in her agitation, to where he stood. She sat on the couch
by the corner of the hearth, and he looked down at her there.

"No," he said, "it won't. It'll give him a chance to get all right. I've
convinced her it's the only thing to do. He can't be left here for you
to look after."

"Did she tell you?"

"She wouldn't have told me a thing if I hadn't made her. I dragged it
out of her, bit by bit."

"Rodney, that was cruel of you."

"Was it? I don't care. I'd have done it if she'd bled."

"What did she tell you?"

"Pretty nearly everything, I imagine. Quite enough for me to see what,
between them, they've been doing to you."

"Did she tell you _how he got well_?"

He did not answer all at once. It was as if he drew back before the
question, alien and disturbed, shirking the discerned, yet
unintelligible issue.

"Did she tell you, Rodney?" Agatha repeated.

"Well, yes. She _told_ me."

He seemed to be making, reluctantly, some admission. He sat down beside
her, and his movement had the air of ending the discussion. But he did
not look at her.

"What do you make of it?" she said.

This time he winced visibly.

"I don't make anything. If it happened--if it happ