To be wedded to a mass of furious and malignant nerves (which was all that poor Bella was now) simply meant destruction to a man like Rodney Lanyon. Rodney’s own nerves were not as strong as they had been, after ten years of Bella’s. It had been understood for long enough (understood even by Bella) that if he couldn’t have his week-ends he was done for; he couldn’t possibly have stood the torment and the strain of her. Of course she didn’t know he spent the greater part of them with Agatha Verrall. It was not to be desired that she should know. Her obtuseness helped them. Even in her younger and saner days she had failed, persistently, to realize any profound and poignant thing that touched him; so by the mercy of heaven she had never realized Agatha Verrall. She used to say she had never seen anything _in_ Agatha, which amounted, as he once told her, to not seeing Agatha at all. Still less could she have compassed any vision of the tie—the extraordinary, intangible, immaterial tie that held them. Sometimes, at the last moment, his escape to Agatha would prove impossible; so they had left it further that he was to send her no forewarning; he was to come when and as he could. He could always get a room in the village inn or at the farm near by, and in Agatha’s house he would find his place ready for him, the place which had become his refuge, his place of peace. There was no need to prepare her. She was never not prepared. It was as if by her preparedness, by the absence of preliminaries, of adjustments and arrangements, he was always there, lodged in the innermost chamber. She had set herself apart; she had swept herself bare and scoured herself clean for him. Clean she had to be; clean from the desire that he should come; clean, above all, from the thought, the knowledge she now had, that she could make him come. For if she had given herself up to _that_.... But she never had; never since the knowledge came to her; since she discovered, wonderfully, by a divine accident, that at any moment she could make him—that she had whatever it was, the power, the uncanny, unaccountable Gift. She was beginning to see more and more how it worked; how inevitably, how infallibly it worked. She was even a little afraid of it, of what it might come to mean. It _did_ mean that without his knowledge, separated as they were and had to be, she could always get at him. And supposing it came to mean that she could get at him to make him do things? Why, the bare idea of it was horrible.