"Careful," he said in a sharp whisper. "You told me you could keep perfectly still. If you can't I won't go on." I begged him to go on, and I kept my face a blank. He turned his head slightly and took in the group at the other end of the room. He sat so a moment, with his eyes still turned away, while he said: "Everything—more than life, depends on your self-control during the next few minutes."
I sat staring at him.
"Have you any idea where you are?"—and still he looked not at me but towards the others.
My first bewilderment was giving way to fear. No fear now of anything he could tell me. Fear of the man himself. I saw it all. Not that iron-grey woman who had left the room with the servant, not the brilliant lady upstairs, but the person who had set me thinking wild thoughts at dinner about barred windows and private lunatic asylums.
The man sitting not three feet way from me—was mad.
I calculated the distance between me and the other group, while I answered him: "I am at my aunt's—Mrs. Harborough's."
"Where does your aunt live?"
"At 160 Lowndes Square."
"You are twenty minutes from Lowndes Square. You are in one of the most infamous houses in Europe."