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 up and down the room. He would have given a lot to know what it contained under its five seals; certainly some weighty secret, some fateful and urgent relationship. She certainly said that she was doing it for somebody else; but she was so agitated—But that she could love Thomas was incredible. Thomas was a good-for-nothing, he assured himself with blind fury; he was always getting what he wanted from women, a cynic. All right, he would find him and give him this love letter, and that would be the end of it.

Suddenly a thought flashed through his head. There must be some connection between Thomas and that—what’s his name—that cursed Carson! Because nobody else had ever heard anything about Krakatit, only George Thomas and this other. A new picture introduced itself uninvited into the blurred film of his memory: he, Prokop, was muttering something in his fever (it must have been in Thomas’s room), and George bent over him and wrote something down in a notebook. “Without the slightest doubt that must have been my formula!” he cried. “He wheedled it out of me, stole it, and probably sold it to that Carson!” Prokop grew cold at the thought of such baseness. Christ! and that girl had fallen into the hands of a man like him! If anything in the world was clear it was that she must be protected at any cost!

Good! To begin with he must find Thomas, that criminal. He would give him the sealed package and in addition he would smash his face for him. Also, he would get him in his power. Thomas would have to tell him the name and address of