last night. It wouldn't let
me."

"Very few people do sleep," said Agatha, "for the first time in a
strange place."

"The place isn't strange. That's what I complain of. That's what keeps
me awake. No place ever will be strange when It's there. And It was
there last night."

"Darling----" Milly murmured.

"You know what I mean," he said. "The Thing that keeps me awake. Of
course if I'd slept last night I'd have known it wasn't there. But when
I didn't sleep----"

He left it to them to draw the only possible conclusion.

They dropped the subject. They turned to other things and talked a
little while, sitting with him in his room with the drawn blinds. From
time to time when they appealed to him, he gave an urbane assent, a
murmur, a suave motion of his hand. When the light went, they lit a
lamp. Agatha stayed and dined with them, that being the best thing she
could do.

At nine o'clock she rose and said good-night to Harding Powell. He
smiled a drawn smile.

"Ah--if I could sleep----" he said.

"That's the worst of it--his not sleeping," said Milly at the gate.

"He will sleep. He will sleep," said Agatha.

Milly sighed. She knew he wouldn't.

The plan, she said, was no good after all. It wouldn't work.

CHAPTER THREE

How could it? There was nothing behind it. All Milly's plans had been
like that; they fell to dust; they _were_ dust. They had been always
that pitiful, desperate stirring of the dust to hide the terror, the
futile throwing of the dust in the poor thing's eyes. As if he couldn't
see through it. As if, with the supernatural lucidity, the invincible
cunning of the insane, he didn't see through anything and provide for
it. It was really only his indestructible urbanity, persisting through
the wreck of him, that bore, tolerantly, temperately, with Milly and her
plans. Without it he might be dangerous. With it, as long as it lasted,
little Milly, plan as she would, was safe.

But they couldn't count on its lasting. Agatha had realised that from
the moment when she had seen him draw down the blind again after his
wife had drawn it up. That was the maddest thing he had done yet. She
had shuddered at it as at an act of violence. It outraged, cruelly, his
exquisite quality. It was so unlike him.

She was not sure that Milly hadn't even made things worse by her latest
plan, the flight to Sarratt End. It emphasised the fact that they were
flying, that they had to fly. It had brought her