"Would you?" the voice insisted.
She heard herself answer from the pure threshold of the darkness, "I would."
Sleep came on her there; a divine sleep from beyond the threshold; sacred, inviolate sleep.
It was the seal upon the bond.
HE woke on Friday morning to a vivid and indestructible certainty of escape.
But there had been a condition attached to her deliverance; and it was borne in on her that instead of waiting for the Power to force its terms on her, she would do well to be beforehand with it. Friday was Rodney's day, and this time she knew that he would come. His coming, of course, was nothing, but he had told her plainly that he would not go. She must therefore wire to him not to come.
In order to do this she had to get up early and walk about a mile to the nearest village. She took the shortest way which was by the Farm bridge and up the slanting path to the far end of the wood. She knew vaguely that once, as she had turned the corner of the wood, there had been horrors, and that the divine beauty of green pastures and still waters had appeared to her as a valley of the shadow of evil, but she had no more memory of what she had seen than of a foul dream, three nights dead. She went at first uplifted in the joy of her deliverance, drawing into her the light and fragrance of the young morning. Then she remembered Harding Powell. She had noticed as she passed the Farm house that the blinds were drawn again in all the windows. That was because Harding and Milly were gone. She thought of Harding, of Milly, with an immense tenderness and compassion, but also with lucidity, with sanity. They had gone—yesterday—and she had not seen them. That could not be helped. She had done all that was possible. She could not have seen them as long as the least taint of Harding's malady remained with her. And how could she have faced Milly after having broken her word to her?