could _not_. You should have seen him. First of all he was
completely dressed with his very cap still on his head just as when he
left me on deck two hours before, saying in his soft voice: `The moment
has come to go to bed'--while he meant to go and do that thing and hide
in his dark cabin, and watch the stuff do its work. A cold shudder ran
down my back. He had his hands in the pockets of his jacket, his arms
were pressed close to his thin, upright body, and he shuffled across the
cabin with his short steps. There was a red patch on each of his old
soft cheeks as if somebody had been pinching them. He drooped his head
a little, and looked with a sort of underhand expectation at the captain
and Mrs Anthony standing close together at the other end of the saloon.
The calculating horrible impudence of it! His daughter was there; and
I am certain he had seen the captain putting his finger on his lips to
warn me. And then he had coolly come out! He passed my imagination, I
assure you. After that one shiver his presence killed every faculty in
me--wonder, horror, indignation. I felt nothing in particular just as
if he were still the old gentleman who used to talk to me familiarly
every day on deck. Would you believe it?"

"Mr Powell challenged my powers of wonder at this internal phenomenon,"
went on Marlow after a slight pause. "But even if they had not been
fully engaged, together with all my powers of attention in following the
facts of the case, I would not have been astonished by his statements
about himself. Taking into consideration his youth they were by no
means incredible; or, at any rate, they were the least incredible part
of the whole. They were also the least interesting part. The interest
was elsewhere, and there of course all he could do was to look at the
surface. The inwardness of what was passing before his eyes was hidden
from him, who had looked on, more impenetrably than from me who at a
distance of years was listening to his words. That what presently
happened at this crisis in Flora de Barral's fate was beyond his power
of comment, seemed in a sense natural. And his own presence on the
scene was so strangely motived that it was left for me to marvel alone
at this young man, a completely chance-comer, having brought it about on
that night."

Each situation created either by folly or wisdom has its psychological
moment. The behaviour of young Powell with its mixture of boyish
impul