to the house with the
drawn blinds in the closed, barred valley, to the end of the world, to
the end of her tether. And when she realised that it _was_ the end--when
he realised it ...

Agatha couldn't leave him there. She couldn't (when she had the secret)
leave him to poor Milly and her plans. That had been in her mind when
she had insisted on it that he would sleep.

She knew what Milly meant by her sigh and the look she gave her. If
Milly could have been impolite, she would have told her that it was all
very well to say so, but how were they going to make him? And she too
felt that something more was required of her than that irritating
affirmation. She had got to make him. His case, his piteous case, cried
out for an extension of the gift.

She hadn't any doubt as to its working. There were things she didn't
know about it yet, but she was sure of that. She had proved it by a
hundred experimental intermissions, abstentions, and recoveries. In
order to be sure you had only to let go and see how you got on without
it. She had tried in that way, with scepticism and precaution, on
herself.

But not in the beginning. She could not say that she had tried it in the
beginning at all, even on herself. It had simply come to her, as she put
it, by a divine accident. Heaven knew she had needed it. She had been,
like Rodney Lanyon, on the verge, where he, poor dear, had brought her;
so impossible had it been then to bear her knowledge and, what was
worse, her divination of the things he bore from Bella. It was her
divination, her compassion, that had wrecked her as she stood aside, cut
off from him, he on the verge and she near it, looking on, powerless to
help while Bella tore at him. Talk of the verge, the wonder was they
hadn't gone clean over it, both of them.

She couldn't say then from what region, what tract of unexplored,
incredible mystery her help had come. It came one day, one night when
she was at her worst. She remembered how with some resurgent, ultimate
instinct of surrender she had sunk on the floor of her room, flung out
her arms across the bed in the supreme gesture of supplication, and thus
gone, eyes shut and with no motion of thought or sense in her, clean
into the blackness where, as if it had been waiting for her, the thing
had found her.

It had found her. Agatha was precise on that point. She had not found
it. She had not even stumbled on it, blundered up against it in the
blackness. The way it