must
tell you tonight, my dear."

"My dear!" she exclaimed bitterly, now seeming to rouse herself with an
effort and pretending to put back a stray wisp of her dark hair in
order to hide from him the tears that still lingered on her flushed
cheeks. "You can say that, Carlton, when it has been every night the
same old threadbare excuse of working at the office until midnight?"

She set her face in hard lines, but could not catch his eye.

"Carlton Dunlap," she added in a tone that rasped his very soul, "I am
nobody's fool. I may not know much about bookkeeping and accounting,
but I can add--and two and two, when the same man but different women
compose each two, do not make four, according to my arithmetic, but
three, from which,"--she finished almost hysterically the little speech
she had prepared, but it seemed to fall flat before the man's curiously
altered manner--"from which I shall subtract one."

She burst into tears.

"Listen," he urged, taking her arm gently to lead her to an easy-chair.

"No, no, no!" she cried, now thoroughly aroused, with eyes that again
snapped accusation and defiance at him, "don't touch me. Talk to me, if
you want to, but don't, don't come near me." She was now facing him,
standing in the high-ceilinged "studio," as they called the room where
she had kept up in a desultory manner for her own amusement the art
studies which had interested her before her marriage. "What is it that
you want to say? The other nights you said nothing at all. Have you at
last thought up an excuse? I hope it is at least a 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 o