f 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 been 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; you 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 pa