nted on his
clinging. It was as if, in their undivided substance, he had had
knowledge of her purpose and had prepared himself to fight it. He hung
on desperately; he refused to yield an inch of the ground he had taken
from her. He was no longer a passive thing in that world where she had
brought him. And he had certain advantages. He had possessed her for
three nights and for three days. She had made herself porous to him; and
her sleep had always been his opportunity.

It took her three nights and three days to cast him out. In the first
night she struggled with him. She lay with all her senses hushed, and
brought the divine darkness round her, but in the darkness she was aware
that she struggled. She could build up the walls between them, but she
knew that as fast as she built them he tore at them and pulled them
down.

She bore herself humbly towards the Power that permitted him. She
conceived of it as holiness estranged and offended; she pleaded with
it. She could no longer trust her knowledge of its working, but she
tried to come to terms with it. She offered herself as a propitiation,
as a substitute for Rodney Lanyon, if there was no other way by which he
might be saved.

Apparently that was not the way it worked. Harding seemed to gain. But,
as he kept her awake all night, he had no chance to establish himself,
as he would otherwise have done, in her sleep. The odds between her and
her adversary were even.

The second night _she_ gained. She felt that she had built up her walls
again; that she had cut Harding off. With spiritual pain, with the
tearing of the bonds of compassion, with a supreme agony of rupture, he
parted from her.

Possibly the Power was neutral; for in the dawn after the second night
she slept. That sleep left her uncertain of the event. There was no
telling into what unguarded depths it might have carried her. She knew
that she had been free of her adversary before she slept, but the
chances were that he had got at her in her sleep. Since the Power held
the balance even between her and the invader, it would no doubt permit
him to enter by any loophole that he could seize.

On the third night, as it were in the last watch, she surrendered, but
not to Harding Powell.

She could not say how it came to her; she was lying in her bed with her
eyes shut and her arms held apart from her body, diminishing all
contacts, stripping for her long slide into the cleansing darkness, when
she found