ecret and the essence of her gift. Why, she had brought it to
so fine a point that she could shut out, and by shutting out destroy any
feeling, any thought that did violence to any other. She could shut them
all out, if it came to that, and make the whole place empty. So that, if
this knowledge of her power did violence, she had only to close her door
on it.

She closed it now on the bare thought of his coming; on the little
innocent hope she had that he would come. By an ultimate refinement and
subtlety of honour she refused to let even expectation cling to him.

But though it was dreadful to "work" her gift that way, to make him do
things, there was another way in which she did work it, lawfully,
sacredly, incorruptibly--the way it first came to her. She had worked it
twenty times (without his knowledge, for how he would have scoffed at
her!) to make him well.

Before it had come to her, he had been, ever since she knew him, more or
less ill, more or less tormented by the nerves that were wedded so
indissolubly to Bella's. He was always, it seemed to her terror, on the
verge. And she could say to herself, "Look at him _now_!"

His abrupt, incredible recovery had been the first open manifestation of
the way it worked. Not that she had tried it on him first. Before she
dared do that once she had proved it on herself twenty times. She had
proved it up to the hilt.

But to ensure continuous results it had to be a continuous process; and
in order to give herself up to it, to him (to his pitiful case), she had
lately, as her friends said, "cut herself completely off." She had gone
down into Buckinghamshire and taken a small solitary house at Sarratt
End in the valley of the Chess, three miles from the nearest station.
She had shut herself up in a world half a mile long, one straight hill
to the north, one to the south, two strips of flat pasture, the river
and the white farm-road between. A world closed east and west by the
turn the valley takes there between the hills, and barred by a gate at
each end of the farm-road. A land of pure curves, of delicate colours,
delicate shadows; all winter through a land of grey woods and sallow
fields, of ploughed hillsides pale with the white strain of the chalk.
In April (it was April now) a land shining with silver and with green.
And the ways out of it led into lanes; it had neither sight nor hearing
of the high roads beyond.

There were only two houses in that half-mile of val