decided on the short straight path as leading her farther from the
farm-house, where there could be no doubt that Harding Powell was now.
At the point she had reached, the jutting corner of the wood hid from
her the downward slope of the hill, and the flat land at its foot.

As she turned the corner of the wood, she was brought suddenly in sight
of the valley. A hot wave swept over her brain, so strong that she
staggered as it passed. It was followed by a strange sensation of
physical sickness, that passed also. It was then as if what went through
her had charged her nerves of sight to a pitch of insane and horrible
sensibility. The green of the grass, and of the young corn, the very
colour of life, was violent and frightful. Not only was it abominable in
itself, it was a thing to be shuddered at, because of some still more
abominable significance it had.

Agatha had known once, standing where she stood now, an exaltation of
sense that was ecstasy; when every leaf and every blade of grass shone
with a divine translucence; when every nerve in her thrilled, and her
whole being rang with the joy which is immanent in the life of things.

What she experienced now (if she could have given any account of it) was
exaltation at the other end of the scale. It was horror and fear
unspeakable. Horror and fear immanent in the life of things. She saw the
world in a loathsome transparency; she saw it with the eye of a soul in
which no sense of the divine had ever been, of a soul that denied the
supernatural. It had been Harding Powell's soul, and it had become hers.

Furiously, implacably, he was getting at her.

Out of the wood and the hedges that bordered it there came sounds that
were horrible, because she knew them to be inaudible to any ear less
charged with insanity; small sounds of movement, of strange shiverings,
swarmings, crepitations; sounds of incessant, infinitely subtle urging,
of agony and recoil. Sounds they were of the invisible things unborn,
driven towards birth; sounds of the worm unborn, of things that creep
and writhe towards dissolution. She knew what she heard and saw. She
heard the stirring of the corruption that Life was; the young blades of
corn were frightful to her, for in them was the push, the passion of the
evil which was Life; the trees as they stretched out their arms and
threatened her were frightful with the terror which was Life. Down
there, in that gross green hot-bed, the earth teemed with the