That was the blessedness of her attitude to Harding Powell. It was passionless, impersonal. She wanted nothing of Harding Powell except to help him, and to help Milly, dear little Milly. And never before had she been given so complete, so overwhelming a sense of having helped. It was nothing--unless it was a safeguard against vanity--that they didn't know it, that they persisted in thinking that it was Milly's plan that worked. Not that that altogether accounted for it to Harding Powell. He said so at last to Agatha. They were returning, he and she, by the edge of the wood at the top of the steep field after a long walk. He had asked her to go with him--it was her country--for a good stretch, further than Milly's little feet could carry her. They stood a moment up there and looked around them. April was coming on, but the ploughed land at their feet was still bare; the earth waited. On that side of the valley she was delicately unfruitful, spent with rearing the fine, thin beauty of the woods. But, down below, the valley ran over with young grass and poured it to the river in wave after wave, till the last surge of green rounded over the water's edge. Rain had fallen in the night, and the river had risen; it rested there, poised. It was wonderful how a thing so brimming, so shining, so alive could be so still; still as marsh water, flat to the flat land. At that moment, in a flash that came like a shifting of her eyes, the world she looked at suffered a change. And yet it did not change. All the appearances of things, their colours, the movement and the stillness remained as if constant in their rhythm and their scale; but they were heightened, intensified; they were carried to a pitch that would have been vehement, vibrant, but that the stillness as well as the movement was intense. She was not dazzled by it or confused in any way. Her senses were exalted, adjusted to the pitch. She would have said now that the earth at her feet had become insubstantial, but that she knew, in her flash, that what she saw was the very substance of the visible world; live and subtle as flame; solid as crystal and as clean. It was the same world, flat field for flat field and hill for hill; but radiant, vibrant, and, as it were, infinitely transparent. Agatha in her moment saw that the whole world brimmed and shone and was alive with the joy that was its life, joy that flowed flood-high and yet was still. In every leaf, in every blade of grass, this life was manifest as a strange, a divine translucence. She was about to point it out to the man at her side when she remembered that he had eyes for the beauty of the earth, but no sense of its secret and supernatural light. Harding Powell denied, he always had denied the supernatural. And when she turned to him her vision had passed from her. They must have another tramp some day, he said. He wanted to see more of this wonderful place. And then he spoke of his recovery.