of the shrewdest in the
city.

A tenant moved into the apartment across the hall from Constance, and
another hired an apartment in the next house, across the court. There
was constant espionage. She seemed to "sense" it. The newcomer was very
neighborly, explaining that her husband was a traveling salesman, and
that she was alone for weeks at a time.

The lines tightened. The next door neighbor always seemed to be around
at mail time, trying to get a look at the postmarks on the Dunlap
letters. She had an excuse in the number of letters to herself. "Orders
for my husband," she would smile. "He gets lots of them personally
here."

All their ingenuity went for naught. Constance was not to be caught
that way.

They tried new tricks. If it was a journey she took, some one went with
her whom she had to shake off sooner or later. There were visits of
peddlers, gas men, electric light and telephone men. They were all
detectives, also, always seeking a chance to make a search that might
reveal her secret. The janitor who collected the waste paper found that
it had a ready sale at a high price. Every stratagem that Drummond's
astute mind could devise was called into play. But nothing, not a scrap
of new evidence did they find.

Yet all the time Constance was in direct communication with Mackenzie.

Graeme, in his enforced idleness, was more deeply in love with
Constance now than ever. He had eyes for nothing else. Even his
fortunes would have been disregarded, had he not felt that to do that
would have been the surest way to condemn himself before her.

They had cut out the evening trips now, for fear of recognition. She
was working faithfully. Already she had cleaned up something like fifty
thousand dollars on the turn over of the stuff he had stolen. Another
week and it would be some thousands more.

Yet the strain was beginning to show.

"Oh, Graeme," she cried, one night after she had a particularly hard
time in shaking Drummond's shadows in order to make her unconventional
visit to him, "Graeme, I'm so tired of it all--tired."

He was about to pour out what was in his own heart when she resumed,
"It's the lonesomeness of it. We are having success. But, what is
success--alone?"

"Yes," he echoed, thinking of his feeling that night when she had left
him at the elevator, of the feeling now every moment of the time she
was away from him, "yes, alone!"

With the utmost difficulty he restrained the wildly surging