Claire rested her elbows on the table and cupped her chin in her hands. She stared at the letter. At first the words ran together, and she could not make them out. Then a sentence took form, and then another—and she read them piteously. “... I asked a girl to marry me, and in doing so felt she had the right to my full confidence. She did me in... She read on to the end.
“But it's not true!” she cried out sharply. “I don't believe it!”
“Of course, it isn't true!” said Crang complacently. “And, of course, you don't believe it! But Larmon will. I've only shown you the letter to let you see what kind of a yellow cur this would-be lover of yours is. Anything to save himself! But so long as he wrote the letter, I had no quarrel with him if he wanted to fake excuses for himself that gave him a chance of holding his job with Larmon afterwards.”
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.