It couldn't be true--true that John Bruce had even written the letter, a miserable Judas thing that baited a trap, for one who trusted him, with the good name of a woman for whom he had professed to care. It couldn't be true--but the signature was there, and--and it was genuine: “John Bruce.... John Bruce.... John Bruce.” It seemed to strike at her with the cruel, stinging blows of a whip-lash: “John Bruce.... John Bruce.... John----” The words became blurred. It was the infinite hopelessness of everything that crushed her fortitude, and mocked it, and made of it at last a beaten thing. A tear fell and splashed upon the page--and still another. She kept looking at the letter, though she could only see it through a blinding mist. And there was something ominous, and something that added to her fear, that she should imagine that her tears made _black_ splashes on the blurred letter as they fell, and----- She heard a sudden startled snarl from Crang, and the letter was snatched up from the table. And then he seemed to laugh wildly, without reason, as a maniac would laugh--and with the letter clutched in his hand rushed from the room. Claire crushed her hands against her temples. Perhaps it was herself who had gone mad. The front door banged. CHAPTER SIXTEEN--A WOLF LICKS HIS CHOPS |OUTSIDE the house Crang continued to run. He was unconscious that he had forgotten his hat. His face worked in livid fury. Alternately he burst out into short, ugly gusts of laughter that made of laughter an evil thing; alternately, racked with unbridled passion, he mouthed a flood of oaths. He ran on for some three blocks, and finally dashed up the steps of a small, drab-looking, cheap frame house. A brass sign, greenish with mold from neglect, flanked one side of the door. Under the street light it could just barely be deciphered: SYDNEY ANGUS CRANG, M.D. He tried the door. It was locked. He searched impatiently and hastily in his pockets for his pass-key, and failing to find it instantly he rang the bell; and then, without waiting for an answer to the summons, he immediately began to bang furiously upon the panels. An old woman, his housekeeper, whose bare feet had obviously been thrust hurriedly into slippers, and who clutched at the neck of a woolen dressing gown that also obviously, and with equal haste, had been flung around her shoulders over her nightdress, finally opened the door. “Get out of the road!” Crang snarled--and brushed his way roughly past her.