"You may leave the room. Blatchford will meet you downstairs."
Santoine reached for the house telephone beside his bed—receiver and transmitter on one light band—and gave directions to have Blatchford await Eaton in the hall below.
Eaton stood an instant longer, studying Santoine and trying fruitlessly to make out what was passing in the blind man's mind. He was distinctly frightened by the revelation he just had had of Santoine's clear, implacable reasoning regarding him; for none of the blind man's deductions about him had been wrong—all had been the exact, though incomplete, truth. It was clear to him that Santoine was close—much closer even than Santoine himself yet appreciated—to knowing Eaton's identity; it was even probable that one single additional fact—the discovery, for instance, that Miss Davis was the source of the second telegram received by Eaton on the train—would reveal everything to Santoine. And Eaton was not certain that Santoine, even without any new information, would not reach the truth unaided at any moment. So Eaton knew that he himself must act before this happened. But so long as the safe in Santoine's study was kept locked or was left open only while some one was in the room with it, he could not act until he had received help from outside; and he had not yet received that help; he could not hurry it or even tell how soon it was likely to come. He had seen Miss Davis several times as she passed through the halls going or coming for her work with Avery; but Blatchford had always been with him, and he had been unable to speak with her or to receive any signal from her.
As his mind reviewed, almost instantaneously, these considerations, he glanced again at Harriet; her eyes, this time, met his, but she looked away immediately. He could not tell what effect Santoine's revelations had had on her, except that she seemed to be in complete accord with her father. As he went toward the door, she made no move to accompany him. He went out without speaking and closed the inner and the outer doors behind him; then he went down to Blatchford.
For several minutes after Eaton had left the room, Santoine thought in silence. Harriet stayed motionless, watching him; the extent to which he had been shaken and disturbed by the series of events which had started with Warden's murder, came home strongly to her now that she saw him alone and now that his talk with Eaton had shown partly what was passing in his mind.
"Where are you, Harriet?" he asked at last.
She knew it was not necessary to answer him, but merely to move so that he could tell her position; she moved slightly, and his sightless eyes shifted at once to where she stood.
"How did he act?" Santoine asked.
She reviewed swiftly the conversation, supplementing his blind apperceptions of Eaton's manner with what she herself had seen.
"What have been your impressions of Eaton's previous social condition, Daughter?" he asked.