longed, with an unendurable longing, for his visible, bodily
presence. She had not realised her joy as long as it was with her; she
had refused to acknowledge it because of its mortal quality, and it had
raised no cry that troubled her abiding spiritual calm. But now that
she had put it from her, it thrust itself on her, it cried, it clung
piteously to her and would not let her go. She looked back to the last
year, her year of Fridays, and saw it following her, following and
entreating. She looked forward and she saw Friday after Friday coming
upon her, a procession of pitiless days, trampling it down, her small,
piteous mortal joy, and her mortality rose in her and revolted. She had
been disturbed by what she had called the "lurking possibilities" in
Rodney; they were nothing to the lurking possibilities in her.

There were moments when her desire to see Rodney sickened her with its
importunity. Each time she beat it back, in an instant, to its burrow
below the threshold, and it hid there, it ran underground. There were
ways below the threshold by which desire could get at him. Therefore,
one night--Tuesday of the fourth week--she cut him off. She refused to
hold him even by a thread. It was Bella and Bella only that she held
now.

On Friday of that week she heard from him. Bella was still all right.
But _he_ wasn't. Anything but. He didn't know what was the matter with
him. He supposed it was the same old thing again. He couldn't think how
poor Bella stood him, but she did. It must be awfully bad for her. It
was beastly, wasn't it? that he should have got like that, just when
Bella was so well.

She might have known it. She had in fact known. Having once held him,
and having healed him, she had no right--as long as the Power consented
to work through her--she had no right to let him go.

She began again from the beginning, from the first process of
purification and surrender. But what followed was different now. She
had not only to recapture the crystal serenity, the holiness of that
state by which she had held Rodney Lanyon and had healed him; she had to
recover the poise by which she had held him and Harding Powell together.
And the effort to recover it became a striving, a struggle in which
Harding persisted and prevailed. Yes, there was no blinking it, he
prevailed.

She had been prepared for it, but not as for a thing that could really
happen. It was contrary to all that she knew of the beneficent working