She began again from the beginning, from the first process of purification and surrender. But what followed was different now. She had not only to recapture the crystal serenity, the holiness of that state by which she had held Rodney Lanyon and had healed him; she had to recover the poise by which she had held him and Harding Powell together. She was bound equally not to let Harding go. It was now almost a struggle to concentrate on both Rodney and Harding, a struggle in which Harding persisted and prevailed. Yes, there was no blinking it, he prevailed. She had been prepared for it, but not as for a thing that could really happen. It was contrary to all that she knew of the beneficent working of the Power. She thought she knew all its ways, its silences, its reassurances, its inexplicable reservations and evasions. She couldn’t be prepared for this—that it, the high and holy, the unspeakably pure thing should allow Harding to prevail, should connive (that was what it looked like) at his taking the gift into his own hands and turning it to his own advantage against Rodney Lanyon. Not that she thought it really had connived. That was unthinkable, and Agatha did not think these things; she felt them. Hitherto she had had no misgivings as to the possible behaviour of the Power. And now she was afraid, not of It, and not, certainly not, of poor Harding (how could she be afraid of him?); she was afraid mysteriously, without knowing why or how. It was her fear that made her write to Rodney Lanyon. She wrote in the beginning of the fifth week (she was counting the weeks now). She only wanted to know, she said, that he was better, that he was well. She begged him to write and tell her that he was well. He did not write. And every night of that week, in those “states” of hers, Powell predominated. He was becoming almost a visible presence impressed upon the blackness of the “state.” All she could do then was to evoke the visible image of Rodney Lanyon and place it there over Harding’s image, obliterating him. Now, properly speaking, the state, the perfection of it, did not admit of visible presences, and that Harding could so impress himself showed more than anything the extent to which he had prevailed. He prevailed to such good purpose that he was now, Milly said, well enough to go back to business. They were to leave Sarratt End in about ten days, when they would have been there seven weeks. She had come over on the Sunday to let Agatha know that; and also, she said, to make a confession. Milly’s face, as she said it, was all candour. It had filled out; it had bloomed in her happiness; it was shadowless, featureless almost, like a flower. She had done what she said she wouldn’t do; she had told Harding. “Oh, Milly, what on earth did you do that for?” Agatha’s voice was strange. “I thought it better,” Milly said, revealing the fine complacence of her character. “Why better?”