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.
"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."
"But, dearest, you said yourself it was. The one place."
"Yesterday? I daresay. But I didn't sleep last night. It wouldn't let me."
"Very few people do sleep," said Agatha, "for the first time in a strange place."
"The place isn't strange. That's what I complain of. That's what keeps me awake. No place ever will be strange when It's there. And It was there last night."