etimes, at the last moment, his escape to Agatha would prove
impossible; so they had left it further that he was to send her no
forewarning; he was to come when and as he could. He could always get a
room in the village inn or at the Farm near by, and in Agatha's house he
would find his place ready for him, the place which had become his
refuge, his place of peace.

There was no need to prepare her. She was never not prepared. It was as
if by her preparedness, by the absence of preliminaries, of adjustments
and arrangements, he was always there, lodged in the innermost chamber.
She had set herself apart; she had swept herself bare and scoured
herself clean for him. Clean she had to be; clean from the desire that
he should come; clean, above all, from the thought, the knowledge she
now had, that she could make him come.

For if she had given herself up to _that_----

But she never had; never since the knowledge came to her; since she
discovered, wonderfully, by a divine accident, that at any moment she
could make him--that she had whatever it was, the power, the uncanny,
unaccountable Gift.

She was beginning to see more and more how it worked; how inevitably,
how infallibly it worked. She was even a little afraid of it, of what it
might come to mean. It _did_ mean that without his knowledge, separated
as they were and had to be, she could always get at him.

And supposing it came to mean that she could get at him to make him do
things? Why, the bare idea of it was horrible.

Nothing could well have been _more_ horrible to Agatha. It was the
secret and the essence of their remarkable relation that she had never
tried to get at him; whereas Bella _had_, calamitously; and still more
calamitously, because of the peculiar magic that there was (there must
have been) in her, Bella had succeeded. To have tried to get at him
would have been, for Agatha, the last treachery, the last indecency;
while for Rodney it would have been the destruction of her charm. She
was the way of escape for him from Bella; but she had always left her
door, even the innermost door, wide open; so that where shelter and
protection faced him there faced him also the way of departure, the way
of escape from _her_.

And if her thought could get at him and fasten on him and shut him in
there----

It could, she knew; but it need not. She was really all right. Restraint
had been the essence and the secret of the charm she had, and it was
also the s