ugh; Harding's premonitory fears and tremblings; Harding's exalted
sensibility; Harding's abominable vision of the world, that vision from
which the resplendent divinity had perished; Harding's flight before the
pursuing Terror. She was sitting now as Harding had sat when she found
him crouching over the hearth in that horrible room with the drawn
blinds. It seemed to her that to have a madness of your own would not be
so very horrible. It would be, after all, your own. It could not
possibly be one-half so horrible as this, to have somebody else's
madness put into you.

The one thing by which she knew herself was the desire that no longer
ran underground, but emerged and appeared before her, lit by her lucid
flashes, naked and unashamed.

She still knew her own. And there was something in her still that was
greater than the thing that inhabited her, the pursuer, the pursued,
who had rushed into her as his refuge, his sanctuary; and that was her
fear of him and of what he might do there. If her doors stood open to
him, they stood open to Bella and to Rodney Lanyon too. What else had
she been trying for, if it were not to break down in all three of them
the barriers of flesh and blood and to transmit the Power? In the
unthinkable sacrament to which she called them they had all three
partaken. And since the holy thing could suffer her to be thus
permeated, saturated with Harding Powell, was it to be supposed that she
could keep him to herself, that she would not pass him on to Rodney
Lanyon.

It was not, after all, incredible. If he could get at her, of course he
could get, through her, at Rodney.

That was the Terror of terrors, and it was her own. That it could
subsist together with that alien horror, that it remained supreme
beside it, proved that there was still some tract in her where the
invader had not yet penetrated. In her love for Rodney and her fear for
him she entrenched herself against the destroyer. There at least she
knew herself impregnable.

It was in such a luminous flash that she saw the thing still in her own
hands, and resolved that it should cease.

She would have to break her word to Milly. She would have to let Harding
go, to loosen deliberately his hold on her and cut him off. It could be
done. She had held him through her gift, and it would be still possible,
through the gift, to let him go. Of course she knew it would be hard.

It _was_ hard. It was terrible; for he clung. She had not cou