d they say--incurable."

"It isn't----?" He paused.

"I can't tell you what it is. It isn't anything you'd think it was. It
isn't anything bodily."

"I never knew it."

"You're not supposed to know. And you wouldn't, unless you _did_ know.
And please--you don't; you don't know anything."

He smiled. "No. You haven't told me, have you?"

"I only told you because you never tell things, and because----"

"Because?" He waited, smiling.

"Because I wanted you to see he doesn't count."

"Well--but _she_'s all right, I take it?"

At first she failed to grasp his implication that if, owing to his
affliction, Harding Powell didn't count, Milly, his young wife did. Her
faculties of observation and of inference would, he took it, be
unimpaired.

"_She_'ll wonder, won't she?" he expounded.

"About us? Not she. She's too much wrapped up in him to notice anyone."

"And he?"

"Oh, my dear--He's too much wrapped up in _it_."

Another anxiety then came to him.

"I say, you know, he isn't dangerous, is he?"

She laughed.

"Dangerous? Oh dear me, no! A lamb."

CHAPTER TWO

She kept on saying to herself, Why shouldn't they come? What difference
did it make?

Up till now she had not admitted that anything could make a difference,
that anything could touch, could alter by a shade the safe, the
intangible, the unique relation between her and Rodney. It was proof
against anything that anybody could think. And the Powells were not
given to thinking things. Agatha's own mind had been a crystal without a
flaw, in its clearness, its sincerity.

It had to be to ensure the blessed working of the gift; as again, it was
by the blessed working of the gift that she had kept it so. She could
only think of that, the secret, the gift, the inexpressible thing, as
itself a flawless crystal, a charmed circle; or rather, as a sphere that
held all the charmed circles that you draw round things to keep them
safe, to keep them holy.

She had drawn her circle round Rodney Lanyon and herself. Nobody could
break it. They were supernaturally safe.

And yet the presence of the Powells had made a difference. She was
forced to own that, though she remained untouched, it had made a
difference in him. It was as if, in the agitation produced by them, he
had brushed aside some veil and had let her see something that up till
now her crystal vision had refused to see, something that was more than
a lurking possibility. She discovered i