of the Power. She thought she knew all its ways, its silences, its
reassurances, its inexplicable reservations and evasions. She couldn't
be prepared for this--that it, the high and holy, the unspeakably pure
thing should allow Harding to prevail, should connive (that was what it
looked like) at his taking the gift into his own hands and turning it to
his own advantage against Rodney Lanyon.

It was her fear at last that made her write to Rodney. She wrote in the
beginning of the fifth week (she was counting the weeks now). She only
wanted to know, she said, that he was better, that he was well. She
begged him to write and tell her that he was well.

He did not write.

And every night of that week, in those "states" of hers, Powell
prevailed. He was becoming almost a visible presence impressed upon the
blackness of the "state." All she could do then was to evoke the visible
image of Rodney Lanyon and place it there over Harding's image,
obliterating him. Now, properly speaking, the state, the perfection of
it, did not admit of visible presences, and that Harding could so
impress himself showed more than anything the extent to which he had
prevailed.

He prevailed to such good purpose that he was now, Milly said, well
enough to go back to business. They were to leave Sarratt End in about
ten days, when they would have been there seven weeks.

She had come over on the Sunday to let Agatha know that; and also, she
said, to make a confession.

Milly's face, as she said it, was all candour. It had filled out; it had
bloomed in her happiness; it was shadowless, featureless almost, like a
flower.

She had done what she said she wouldn't do; she had told Harding.

"Oh Milly, what on earth did you do that for?" Agatha's voice was
strange.

"I thought it better," Milly said, revealing the fine complacence of her
character.

"Why better?"

"Because secrecy is bad. And he was beginning to wonder. He wanted to go
back to business; and he wouldn't because he thought it was the place
that did it."

"I see," said Agatha. "And what does he think it is now?"

"He thinks it's _you_, dear."

"But I told you--I told you--that was what you were not to think."

"My dear, it's an immense concession that he should think it's you."

"A concession to what?"

"Well, I suppose, to the supernatural."

"Milly, you shouldn't have told him. You don't know what harm you might
have done. I'm not sure even now that you have not don