And he slammed into the office, the rest of us at his heels.
P.Montmorency, House-Agent, was a solitary old gentleman sitting behind a bare brown counter.

He had an egglike head, froglike jaws, and a grey hairy fringe of aureole round the lower part of his face; the whole combined with a reddish, aquiline nose.

He wore a shabby black frock-coat, a sort of semi-clerical tie worn at a very unclerical angle, and looked, generally speaking, about as unlike a house-agent as anything could look, short of something like a sandwich man or a Scotch Highlander.
We stood inside the room for fully forty seconds, and the odd old gentleman did not look at us.

Neither, to tell the truth, odd as he was, did we look at him.

Our eyes were fixed, where his were fixed, upon something that was crawling about on the counter in front of him.