If Mrs. Powell would go like that—in that distressing way—she must at least let him walk back with her. Agatha wouldn't mind. He hadn't seen Mrs. Powell for ages.
He had risen to such a height that Milly was bewildered by him. She let him walk back with her to the Farm and a little way beyond it. Agatha said good-bye to Milly at the garden gate and watched them go. Then she went up into her own room.
He was gone so long that she thought he was never coming back again. She did not want him to come back just yet, but she knew that she was not afraid to see him. It did not occur to her to wonder why in spite of her message he had come, nor why he had come by an earlier train than usual; she supposed that he must have started before her message could have reached him. All that, his coming or his not coming, mattered so little now.
For now the whole marvellous thing was clear to her. She knew the secret of the gift. She saw luminously, almost transparently, the way it worked. Milly had shown her. Milly knew; Milly had seen; she had put her finger on the flaw.
It was not fear, Milly had been right there too. Until the moment when Harding Powell had begun to get at her Agatha had never known what fear felt like. It was the strain of mortality in her love for Rodney; the hidden thing, unforeseen and unacknowledged, working its work in the darkness. It had been there all the time, undermining her secret, sacred places. It had made the first breach through which the fear that was not her fear had entered. She could tell the very moment when it happened.
She had blamed poor little Milly, but it was the flaw, the flaw that had given their deadly point to Milly's interference and Harding's importunity. But for the flaw they could not have penetrated her profound serenity. Her gift might have been trusted to dispose of them.
For before that moment the gift had worked indubitably; it had never missed once. She looked back on its wonders; on the healing of herself; the first healing of Rodney and Harding Powell; the healing of Bella. It had worked with a peculiar rhythm of its own, and always in a strict, a measurable proportion to the purity of her intention. To Harding's case she had brought nothing but innocent love and clean compassion; to Bella's nothing but a selfless and beneficent desire to help. And because in Bella's case at least she had been flawless, out of the three Bella's was the only cure that had lasted. It had most marvellously endured. And because of the flaw in her she had left Harding worse than she had found him. No wonder that poor Milly had reproached her.
It mattered nothing that Milly's reproaches went too far, that in Milly's eyes she stood suspected of material sin (anything short of the tangible had never been enough for Milly); it mattered nothing that (though Milly mightn't believe it) she had sinned only in her thought; for Agatha, who knew, that was enough; more than enough; it counted more.
For thought went wider and deeper than any deed; it was of the very order of the Powers intangible wherewith she had worked. Why, thoughts unborn and shapeless, that ran under the threshold and hid there, counted more in that world where It, the Unuttered, the Hidden and the Secret, reigned.