Constance Dunlap | Page 2

clever one."
"Constance," he remonstrated, looking fearfully about. Instinctively she
felt that her accusation was unjust. Not even that had dulled the hunted
look in his face. "Perhaps--perhaps if it were that of which you suspect
me, we could patch it up. I don't know. But, Constance, I--I must leave
for the west on the first train in the morning." He did not pause to
notice her startled look, but raced on. "I have worked every night this
week trying to straighten out those accounts of mine by the first of the
year and--and I can't do it. An expert begins on them in a couple of
days. You must call up the office to-morrow and tell them that I am ill,
tell them anything. I must get at least a day or two start before they--"
"Carlton," she interrupted, "what is the matter? What have you--"
She checked herself in surprise. He had been fumbling in his pocket
and now laid down a pile of green and yellow banknotes on the table.
"I have scraped together every last cent I can spare," he continued,
talking jerkily to suppress his emotion. "They cannot take those away
from you, Constance. And--when I am settled--in a new life," he
swallowed hard and averted his eyes further from her startled gaze,
"under a new name, somewhere, if you have just a little spot in your
heart that still responds to me, I--I--no, it is too much even to hope.
Constance, the accounts will not come out right because I am-- I am an
embezzler."
He bit off the word viciously and then sank his head into his hands and
bowed it to a depth that alone could express his shame.
Why did she not say something, do something? Some women would
have fainted. Some would have denounced him. But she stood there
and he dared not look up to read what was written in her face. He felt
alone, all alone, with every man's hand against him, he who had never

in all his life felt so or had done anything to make him feel so before.
He groaned as the sweat of his mental and physical agony poured
coldly out on his forehead. All that he knew was that she was standing
there, silent, looking him through and through, as cold as a statue. Was
she the personification of justice? Was this but a foretaste of the
ostracism of the world?
"When we were first married, Constance," he began sadly, "I was only
a clerk for Green & Co., at two thousand a year. We talked it over. I
stayed and in time became cashier at five thousand. But you know as
well as I that five thousand does not meet the social obligations laid on
us by our position in the circle in which we are forced to move."
His voice had become cold and hard, but he did not allow himself to be
betrayed into adding, as he might well have done in justice to himself,
that to her even a thousand dollars a month would have been only a
beginning. It was not that she had be accustomed to so much in the
station of life from which he had taken her. The plain fact was that New
York had had an over-tonic effect on her.
"You were not a nagging woman, Constance," he went on in a
somewhat softened tone. "In fact you have been a good wife; yon have
never thrown it up to me that I was unable to make good to the degree
of many of our friends in purely commercial lines. All you have ever
said is the truth. A banking house pays low for its brains. My God!" he
cried stiffening out in the chair and clenching his fists, "it pays low for
its temptations, too."
There had been nothing in the world Carlton would not have given to
make happy the woman who stood now, leaning on the table in cold
silence, with averted head, regarding neither him nor the pile of
greenbacks.
"Hundreds of thousands of dollars passed through my hands every
week," he resumed. "That business owed me for my care of it. It was
taking the best in me and in return was not paying what other
businesses paid for the best in other men. When a man gets thinking
that way, with a woman whom he loves as I love you--something

happens."
He paused in the bitterness of his thoughts. She moved as if to speak.
"No, no," he interrupted. "Hear me out first. All I asked was a chance to
employ a little of the money that I saw about me--not to take it, but to
employ it for a little while, a few days, perhaps only a few