ate
with Reynolds," put in Dunlap.

"I thought you would," commented Drummond dryly. "I may as well tell
you that I fear some one has been tampering with your mail."

"Tampering with OUR mail?" repeated Dunlap, aghast. "Impossible."

"Nothing is impossible until it is proved so," answered Drummond,
looking him straight in the eyes. Carlton did not flinch. He felt a new
power within himself, gained during the past few days of new
association with Constance. For her he could face anything.

But when Drummond was gone he felt as he had on the night when he had
finally realized that he could never cover up the deficit in his books.
With an almost superhuman effort he gripped himself. Interminably the
hours of the rest of the day dragged on.

That night he sank limp into a chair on his return home. "A man named
Drummond was in the office to-day, my dear," he said. "Some one in the
office sent Reynolds a duplicate bill, and they know about the check."

"Well?"

"I wonder if they suspect me?"

"If you act like that, they won't suspect. They'll arrest," she
commented sarcastically.

He had braced up again into his new self at her words. But there was
again that sinking sensation in her heart, as she realized that it was,
after all, herself on whom he depended, that it was she who had been
the will, even though he had been the intellect of their enterprise.
She could not overcome the feeling that, if only their positions could
be reversed, the thing might even yet be carried through.

Drummond appeared again at the office the next day. There was no
concealment about him now. He said frankly that he was from the Burr
Detective Agency, whose business it was to guard the banks against
forgeries.

"The pen work, or, as we detectives call it, the penning," he remarked,
"in the case of that check is especially good. It shows rare skill. But
the pitfalls in this forgery game are so many that, in avoiding one, a
forger, ever so clever, falls into another."

Carlton felt the polite third degree, as he proceeded: "Nowadays the
forger has science to contend with, too. The microscope and camera may
come in a little too late to be of practical use in preventing the
forger from getting his money at first, but they come in very neatly
later in catching him. What the naked eye cannot see in this check they
reveal. Besides, a little iodine vapor brings out the original 'Green &
Co.' on it.

"We have found out also that the prote