“That’s the worst of it—his not sleeping,” said Milly at the gate. “He will sleep. He will sleep,” said Agatha. Milly sighed. She knew he wouldn’t. The plan, she said, was no good after all. It wouldn’t work. III How could it? There was nothing behind it. All Milly’s plans had been like that; they fell to dust; they _were_ dust. There had been always that pitiful, desperate stirring of the dust to hide the terror; the futile throwing of the dust in the poor thing’s eyes. As if he couldn’t see through it. As if, with the supernatural ludicity, the invincible cunning of the insane, he didn’t see through anything and provide for it. It was really only his indestructible urbanity, persisting through the wreck of him, that bore, tolerantly, temperately, with Milly and her plans. Without it he might be dangerous. With it, as long as it lasted, little Milly, plan as she would, was safe. But they couldn’t count on its lasting. Agatha had realized that from the moment when she had seen him draw down the blind again after his wife had drawn it up. That was the maddest thing he had done yet. She had shuddered at it as at an act of violence. It outraged, cruelly, his exquisite quality. It was so unlike him. She was not sure that Milly hadn’t even made things worse by her latest plan, the flight to Sarratt End. It emphasized the fact that they were flying, that they had to fly. It had brought her to the house with the drawn blinds in the closed, barred valley, to the end of the world, to the end of her tether. And when she realized that it _was_ the end, when he realized it.... Agatha couldn’t leave him there. She couldn’t (when she had the secret) leave him to poor Milly and her plans. That had been in her mind when she had insisted on it that he would sleep. She knew what Milly meant by her sigh and the look she gave her. If Milly could have been impolite she would have told her that it was all very well to say so, but how were they going to make him? And she, too, felt that something more was required of her than that irritating affirmation. She had got to make him. His case, his piteous case, cried out for an extension of the gift. She hadn’t any doubt as to its working. There were things she didn’t know about it yet, but she was sure of that. She had proved it by a hundred experimental intermissions, abstentions, and recoveries. In order to be sure you had only to let go and see how you got on without it. She had tried in that way, with scepticism and precaution, on herself.