herself recalling some forgotten, yet inalienable knowledge
that she had. Something said to her: "Do you not remember? There is no
striving and no crying in the world which you would enter. There is no
more appeasing where peace _is_. You cannot make your own terms with the
high and holy Power. It is not enough to give yourself for Rodney
Lanyon, for he is more to you than you are yourself. Besides, any
substitution of self for self would be useless, for there is no more
self there. That is why the Power cannot work that way. But if it should
require you here, on this side the threshold, to give him up, to give up
your desire of him, what then? Would you loose your hold on him and let
him go?"

"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.

CHAPTER TWELVE

She 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