ley, Agatha's house
and Woodman's Farm.

Agatha's house, white as a cutting in the chalk downs, looked southwest,
up the valley and across it, to where a slender beech wood went lightly
up the hill and then stretched out in a straight line along the top,
with the bare fawn-coloured flank of the ploughed land below. The
farmhouse looked east towards Agatha's house across a field; a red-brick
house--dull, dark red with the grey bloom of weather on it--flat-faced
and flat-eyed, two windows on each side of the door and a row of five
above, all nine staring at the small white house across the field. The
narrow, flat farm-road linked the two.

Except Rodney when his inn was full, nobody ever came to Woodman's Farm;
and Agatha's house, set down inside its east gate, shared its isolation,
its immunity. Two villages, unseen, unheard, served her, not a mile
away. It was impossible to be more sheltered, more protected and more
utterly cut off. And only fifteen miles, as the crow flies, between this
solitude and London, so that it was easy for Rodney Lanyon to come down.

At two o'clock, the hour when he must come if he were coming, she began
to listen for the click of the latch at the garden gate. She had agreed
with herself that at the last moment expectancy could do no harm; it
couldn't influence him; for either he had taken the twelve-thirty train
at Marylebone or he had not (Agatha was so far reasonable); so at the
last moment she permitted herself that dangerous and terrible joy.

When the click came and his footsteps after it, she admitted further
(now when it could do no harm) that she had had foreknowledge of him;
she had been aware all the time that he would come. And she wondered,
as she always wondered at his coming, whether really she would find him
well, or whether this time it had incredibly miscarried. And her almost
unbearable joy became suspense, became vehement desire to see him and
gather from his face whether this time also it had worked.

"How are you? How have you been?" was her question when he stood before
her in her white room, holding her hand for an instant.

"Tremendously fit," he answered; "ever since I last saw you."

"Oh--seeing me----" It was as if she wanted him to know that seeing her
made no difference.

She looked at him and received her certainty. She saw him clear-eyed and
young, younger than he was, his clean, bronzed face set, as it used to
be, in a firmness that obliterated the line