Page:The Ball and the Cross.djvu/337

ticularly want to.” He almost ran out of the room, and the two followed swiftly on his flying coat tails. He knocked at an ordinary varnished door in the corridor. When a voice said, “Come in,” MacIan’s breath went hissing back through his teeth into his chest. Turnbull was more impetuous, and opened the door.

It was a neat and well-appointed room entirely lined with a medical library. At the other end of it was a ponderous and polished desk with an incandescent lamp on it, the light of which was just sufficient to show a slender, well-bred figure in an ordinary medical black frock-coat, whose head, quite silvered with age, was bent over neat piles of notes. This gentleman looked up for an instant as they entered, and the lamplight fell on his glittering spectacles and long, clean-shaven face—a face which would have been simply like an aristocrat’s but that a certain lion poise of the head and long cleft in the chin made it look more like a very handsome actor’s. It was only for a flash that his face was thus lifted. Then he bent his silver head over his notes once more, and said, without looking up again:

“I told you, Dr. Quayle, that these men were to go to cells B and C.”