Then as she came, still headlong, to the river, she heard Harding's voice saying something, she did not know what. She couldn't stop to listen to him, or to consider how he came to be there in the valley, when a minute ago she had seen him by the edge of the wood, up on the very top of the hill. He was on the bridge--the Farm bridge--now. He held out his hand to steady her as she came on over the swinging plank. She knew that he had led her to the other side, and that he was standing there, still saying something, and that she 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.