he answered.

"Have you _no_ pity on me? Can't you let me go?"

And then she broke from him and ran.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

She was awake all that night. Harding Powell and the horror begotten of
him had no pity; he would not let her go. Her gift, her secret, was
powerless now against the pursuer.

She had a light burning in her room till morning, for she was afraid of
sleep. Those unlit roads down which, if she slept, the Thing would
surely hunt her, were ten times more terrible than the white-washed,
familiar room where it merely watched and waited.

In the morning she found a letter on her breakfast-table, which the maid
said Mrs. Powell had left late last evening, after Agatha had gone to
bed. Milly wrote: "Dearest Agatha,--Of course I understand. But are we
_never_ going to see you again? What was the matter with you last night?
You terrified poor Harding.--Yours ever, M. P."

Without knowing why, Agatha tore the letter into bits and burned them in
the flame of a candle. She watched them burn.

"Of course," she said to herself, "that isn't sane of me."

And when she had gone round her house and shut all the doors and locked
them, and drawn down the blinds in every closed window, and found
herself cowering over her fireless hearth, shuddering with fear, she
knew that, whether she were mad or not, there was madness in her. She
knew that her face in the glass (she had the courage to look at it) was
the face of an insane terror let loose.

That she did know it, that there were moments--flashes--in which she
could contemplate her state and recognise it for what it was, showed
that there was still a trace of sanity in her. It was not her own
madness that possessed her. It was, or rather it had been, Harding
Powell's; she had taken it from him. That was what it meant--to take
away madness.

There could be no doubt as to what had happened, nor as to the way of
its happening. The danger of it, utterly unforeseen, was part of the
very operation of the gift. In the process of getting at Harding to heal
him she had had to destroy not only the barriers of flesh and blood, but
those innermost walls of personality that divide and protect,
mercifully, one spirit from another. With the first thinning of the
walls Harding's insanity had leaked through to her, with the first
breach it had broken in. It had been transferred to her complete with
all its details, with its very gestures, in all the phases that it ran
thro