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.
He stepped forward along an unlighted hall, opened a door, and slammed it behind him. He switched on the light. He was in his consulting room. The next instant he was standing beside his desk, and had wrenched John Bruce's letter from his pocket. He spread this out on the desk and glared at it. Beyond any doubt whatever, where Claire's tears had fallen on the paper, traces of writing were faintly discernible. Here, out of an abortive word, was a well-formed “e”; and there, unmistakably, was a capital “L.”
Crang burst into a torrent of abuse and oaths; his fists clenched, and he shook one of them in the air.
“Double-crossed—eh?—damn him!” he choked. “He tried to double-cross me—did he?”
Carrying the letter, he ran now into a little room behind his office, where he compounded his medicines, and that was fitted up as a sort of small laboratory.
“I'm a clever man,” Crang mumbled to himself. “We'll see about this!”