is chest, and the first thing Agatha noticed was
the difficult, slow, forward-thrusting movement with which he lifted it.
His eyes seemed to come up last of all from the depths to meet her. With
a peculiar foreign courtesy he bowed his head again over her hand as he
held it.

He apologised for the darkness in which they found him. Harding Powell's
manners had always been perfect, and it struck Agatha as strange and
pathetic that his malady should have left untouched the incomparable
quality he had.

Milly went to the windows and drew the blinds up. The light revealed
him in his exquisite perfection, his small fragile finish. He was fifty
or thereabouts, but slight as a boy, and nervous, and dark as Englishmen
are dark; jaw and chin shaven; his mouth hidden by the straight droop of
his moustache. From the eyes downwards the outlines of his face and
features were of an extreme regularity and a fineness undestroyed by the
work of the strained nerves on the sallow, delicate texture. But his
eyes, dark like an animal's, were the eyes of a terrified thing, a thing
hunted and on the watch, a thing that listened continually for the soft
feet of the hunter. Above these eyes his brows were twisted, were
tortured with his terror.

He turned to his wife.

"Did you lock the door, dear?" he said.

"I did. But you know, Harding, we needn't--here."

He shivered slightly and began to walk up and down before the
hearth-place. When he had his back to Milly, Milly followed him with her
eyes of anguish; when he turned and faced her, she met him with her
white smile.

Presently he spoke again. He wondered whether they would object to his
drawing the blinds down. He was afraid he would have to. Otherwise, he
said, _he would be seen_.

Milly laid her hand on the arm that he stretched towards the window.

"Darling," she said, "you've forgotten. You can't possibly be
seen--here. It's just the one place--isn't it, Agatha?--where you can't
be." Her eyes signalled to Agatha to support her. (Not but what she had
perfect confidence in the plan.)

It was, Agatha assented. "And Agatha knows," said Milly.

He shivered again. He had turned to Agatha.

"Forgive me if I suggest that you cannot really know. Heaven forbid that
you _should_ know."

Milly, intent on her "plan," persisted.

"But, dearest, you said yourself it was. The one place."

"_I_ said that? When did I say it?"

"Yesterday."

"Yesterday? I daresay. But I didn't sleep