“But it was no good, dear, was it? As if I wouldn’t know what it meant. You wouldn’t have done it if you hadn’t been ill. You lost your nerve. No wonder, with those Powells preying on you, body and soul, for weeks.”
“No, Rodney, no. I didn’t want you to come back. And I think—now—it would be better if you didn’t stay.”
It seemed to her now that perhaps he had seen and was fighting what he saw.
“I’m not going to stay,” he said, “I am going—in another hour—to take Powell away somewhere.”
He took it up where she had made him leave it. “Then, Agatha, I shall come back again. I shall come back—let me see—on Sunday.”
She swept that aside.
“Where are you going to take him?”
“To a man I know who’ll look after him.”
“Oh, Rodney, it’ll break Milly’s heart.”
She had come, in her agitation, to where he stood. She sat on the couch by the corner of the hearth, and he looked down at her there.