Part 5 (2/2)
It'll frighten her. She won't know how I'll take it, and she'll think it'll make me go all queer again.”
He paused and turned to her.
”I say, if she _did_ know how I'm taking it, she'd think _that_ awfully queer, wouldn't she?” He paused.
”The worst of it is,” he said, ”I've got to tell her.”
”Will you leave it to me?” Agatha said. ”I think I can make it all right.”
”How?” he queried.
”Never mind how. I can.”
”Well,” he a.s.sented, ”there's hardly anything you can't do.”
That was how she came to tell Milly.
She made up her mind to tell her that evening as they sat alone in Agatha's house. Harding, Milly said, was happy over there with his books; just as he used to be, only more so. So much more so that she was a little disturbed about it. She was afraid it wouldn't last. And again she said it was the place, the wonderful, wonderful place.
”If you want it to last,” Agatha said, ”don't go on thinking it's the place.”
”Why shouldn't it be? I feel that he's safe here. He's out of it. Things can't reach him.”
”Bad news reached him to-day.”
”Aggy--what?” Milly whispered in her fright.
”His sister is very anxious about her little girl.”
”What's wrong?”
Agatha repeated what she had heard from Harding Powell.
”Oh----” Milly was dumb for an instant while she thought of her sister-in-law. Then she cried aloud.
”If the child dies it will make him ill again!”
”No Milly, it won't.”
”It will, I tell you. It's always been that sort of thing that does it.”
”And supposing there was something that keeps it off?”
”What is there? What is there?”
”I believe there's something. Would you mind awfully if it wasn't the place?”
”What do you mean, Agatha?” (There was a faint resentment in Milly's agonised tone.)
It was then that Agatha told her. She made it out for her as far as she had made it out at all, with the diffidence that a decent att.i.tude required.
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