er allowed that it was a secret, or that it need be,
although they guarded it so carefully. Anybody except Bella, who
wouldn't understand it, was welcome to know that he came to see her. He
must mean that.

"Found out?" she repeated.

"If you haven't been, you will be."

"You mean," she said, "Sarratt End has been found out?"

"If you put it that way. I saw the Powells at the station."

(She breathed freely.)

"They told me they'd taken rooms at some farm here."

"Which farm?"

He didn't remember.

"Was it Woodman's Farm?" she asked. And he said, Yes, that was the name
they'd told him. Whereabouts was it?

"Don't you know?" she said. "That's the name of _your_ Farm."

He had not known it, and was visibly annoyed at knowing it now. And
Agatha herself felt some dismay. If it had been any other place but
Woodman's Farm! It stared at them; it watched them; it knew all their
goings out and their comings in; it knew Rodney; not that that had
mattered in the least, but the Powells, when they came, would know too.

She tried to look as if that didn't matter, either, while they faced
each other in a silence, a curious, unfamiliar discomposure.

She recovered first. "After all," she said, "why shouldn't they?"

"Well--I thought you weren't going to tell people."

Her face mounted a sudden flame, a signal of resentment. She had always
resented the imputation of secrecy in their relations. And now it was
as if he were dragging forward the thought that she perpetually put away
from her.

"Tell about what?" she asked, coldly.

"About Sarratt End. I thought we'd agreed to keep it for ourselves."

"I haven't told everybody. But I did tell Milly Powell."

"My dear girl, that wasn't very clever of you."

"I told her not to tell. She knows what I want to be alone for."

"Good God!" As he stared in dismay at what he judged to be her
unspeakable indiscretion, the thought rushed in on her straight from
him, the naked, terrible thought, that there _should_ be anything they
had to hide, they had to be alone for. She saw at the same time how
defenceless he was before it; he couldn't keep it back; he couldn't put
it away from him. It was always with him, a danger watching on his
threshold.

"Then" (he made her face it with him), "we're done for."

"No, no," she cried. "How could you think that? It was another thing.
Something that I'm trying to do."

"You told her," he insisted. "What did you tell her?"

"That I'm