doing it. That I'm here for my health. She understands it that
way."

He smiled as if he were satisfied, knowing her so well. And still his
thought, his terrible naked thought, was there. It was looking at her
straight out of his eyes.

"Are you sure she understands?" he said.

"Yes. Absolutely."

He hesitated, and then put it differently.

"Are you sure she doesn't understand? That she hasn't an inkling?"

_He_ wasn't sure whether Agatha understood, whether she realised the
danger.

"About you and me," he said.

"Ah, my dear, I've kept _you_ secret. She doesn't know we know each
other. And if she did----"

She finished it with a wonderful look, a look of unblinking yet vaguely,
pitifully uncandid candour.

She had always met him, and would always have to meet him, with the idea
that there was nothing in it; for, if she once admitted that there was
anything, then they _were_ done for. She couldn't (how could she?) let
him keep on coming with that thought in him, acknowledged by them both.

That was where she came in and where her secret, her gift, would work
now more beneficently than ever. The beauty of it was that it would make
them safe, absolutely safe. She had only got to apply it to that
thought of his and the thought would not exist. Since she could get at
him, she could do for him what he, poor dear, could not perhaps always
do for himself; she could keep that dreadful possibility in him under;
she could in fact, make their communion all that she most wanted it to
be.

"I don't like it," he said, miserably. "I don't like it."

A little line of worry was coming in his face again.

The door opened and a maid began to go in and out, laying the table for
their meal. He watched the door close on her and said, "Won't that woman
wonder what I come for?"

"She can see what you come for." She smiled. "Why are you spoiling it
with thinking things?"

"It's for you I think them. I don't mind. It doesn't matter so much for
me. But I want you to be safe."

"Oh, _I_'m safe, my dear," she answered.

"You were. And you would be still, if these Powells hadn't found you
out."

He meditated.

"What do you suppose _they_'ve come for?" he asked.

"They've come, I imagine, for his health."

"What? To a god-forsaken place like this?"

"They know what it's done for me. So they think, poor darlings, perhaps
it may do something--even yet--for him."

"What's the matter with him?"

"Something dreadful. An