Lanagan sat with his back to the window, putting Mrs. Watson in the full light.
“Is there anything you can say, Mrs. Watson, that could throw any light upon this affair? Any enemies that Miller ever spoke about? Any visitors that he has had of late? Any letters or other messages that he received? Any threats?”
She threw both hands forth with a despairing gesture.
“Nothing, nothing!” she moaned, as tears came. “It is terrible, terrible! He is innocent, innocent I say! I know he is innocent! I know it!”
She sobbed for a moment, and then, with a sudden gesture of determination, straightened up, dried her eyes, and composed herself.
Lanagan had been watching her with eyes that seemed to narrow and lessen to little black beads. His ears, gifted with abnormal power for receiving and disintegrating into each component shade of meaning or emotion the tones of the human voice, drank in every word that she uttered, marked each sob that shook her form.
“You do not believe your husband guilty, do you?”
Her lips parted in an exclamation of protest, and Lanagan for the first time caught the upper lip; a lip as thin as a paper cutter, that drew tautly and white across the perfect teeth. It suggested a knife to Lanagan.
“She holds true to the type,” he commented to himself grimly. “A curious type, surely, for a prosaic clerk!”
Lanagan’s brain was churning. His beady eyes gleamed as though touched with phosphorescence. Under the concentration of his gaze, the woman unconsciously shrank. Rising from his chair with a movement almost tigerish, he strode before her, upturned her face so that her eyes looked straight up into his, and then, his voice terrific in its tension, and yet scarcely louder than a whisper, said: