It seemed to arouse him from some mental absorption in which his physical entity had been lost. It was five o'clock, and he was John Bruce. At eleven o'clock--or was it twelve?--last night he had left Hawkins standing by the door of the traveling pawn-shop, and since then---- He stared around him. He was somewhere downtown. He did not know where. He began to walk in an uptown direction. Something had been born in those hours. Something cataclysmic. What was it? “Or him!” The words came again--aloud--without apparent volition. What did that mean? It had something to do with Hawkins; with what Hawkins had said, standing there by the traveling pawn-shop. What was it Hawkins had said? Yes; he remembered: “I'd rather see her dead.” “Or him!” With cold judicial precision now the hours unrolled themselves before him. “Or him!” He was going to kill Crang. The hours of mental strife, of torment through which he had just passed, were as the memory of some rack upon which his soul had been put to torture. They came back vividly now, those hours--every minute of them a living eternity. His soul had shrunk back aghast at first, and called it murder; but it was not murder, or, if it was, it was imperative. It was the life of a foul viper--or Claire's. It was the life of an unclean thing that mocked and desecrated all decency, that flung its sordid challenge at every law, both human and divine--or the life of a pure, clean soul made the plaything of this beast, and dragged into a mire of unutterable abomination to suffocate and strangle in its noxious surroundings and die. And that soul was in jeopardy because at this moment he, John Bruce, had the power of movement in his limbs, the sense of sight, the ability to stretch out his hand and feel it touch that lamp-post there, and, if he would, to speak aloud and designate that object for what it was--a lamp-post. She had bought him these things with her life. Should she die--and he live? And he remembered back through those hours since midnight, when his soul had still faltered before the taking of human life, how it had sought some other way, some alternative, _any_ alternative. A jail sentence for Crang. There was enough, more than enough now with the evidence of Crang's double life, to convict the man for the robbery of that safe. But Claire had answered that in the long ago: “I will marry him when he comes out.” Or, then, to get Crang away again like this afternoon--no, _yesterday_ afternoon. It was _this_ morning, in a few hours, that they were to be married. There was no time left in which to attempt anything like that; but, even if there were, he knew now, that it but postponed the day of reckoning. Claire would wait. Crang would come back. He was going to kill Crang.