“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:
“Did _you_ wheedle Thaddeus Miller into making a will in your favour and then murder him?”
So quickly that her act seemed rather involuntary than by any conscious impulse, she leaped to her feet, her breast rising and falling tumultuously. She struggled inarticulately for speech, raised her hand as though to strike him in the face, and collapsed in a swoon at his feet.
Lanagan gazed coldly down upon her without qualm. He was impersonal now; the incarnation of newspaper truth. He only regretted that she had balked him by swooning. Swiftly he straightened her out, loosed her collar, and was busily engaged chafing her hands when heavy footfalls sounded from the porch, and the bell rang loudly.
“By the brogans and the ring, our friends of the upper office,” commented Lanagan cynically as he opened the door. Quinlan and Pryor from the Oakland department entered, viewing Lanagan suspiciously as they beheld the still form upon the floor.
“She’s in better shape for the hospital than your third degree in the detinue cells,” remarked Lanagan, vouchsafing no explanations. “Went out just this minute as I was interviewing her.”
Quinlan and Pryor settled themselves heavily, lit fresh cigars, made laboured notes of the circumstances, and, when Lanagan finally restored the woman, gave her some breathing space and then informed her that she was to be taken to see her husband. To Lanagan she directed no look--addressed no word. She moved as one in a trance.