would have been strangely
illogical. It was enough that, short as their acquaintance had been,
she felt unconsciously that there was something latent in the spirit of
this man akin to her own.

Murray also felt rather than understood the bond that had been growing
so rapidly between them. His was the temperament that immediately
translates feeling into action. He reached into his breast pocket.
There was the blue-black glint of a cold steel automatic. A moment he
balanced it in his hand. Then with a rapid and decisive motion of the
arm he flung it far from him. As it struck the water with a sound
horribly suggestive of the death gurgle of a lost man, he turned and
faced her.

"There," he exclaimed with a new light in the defiant, desperate smile
that she had observed many times before, "there. The curtain
rises--instead of falls."

Neither spoke for a few moments. At last he added, "What shall I do
next?"

"Do?" she repeated. She felt now the weight of responsibility for
interfering with his desperate plans, but it did not oppress her. On
the contrary, it was a pleasant burden. "According to your own story,"
she went on, "they know nothing yet, as far as you can see. You would
have forestalled them by taking this little vacation during which you
could disappear while they would discover the shortage. Do? Go back."

"And when they discover it?" he asked evidently prepared for the answer
she had given and eager to know what she would propose next.

Constance had been thinking rapidly.

"Listen," she cried, throwing aside restraint now. "No one in New York
outside my former little circle knows me. I can live there in another
circle unobserved. For weeks I have been amusing myself by the study of
shorthand. I have picked up enough to be able to carry the thing off.
Discharge your secretary. Put an advertisement in the newspapers. I
will answer it. Then I will be able to help you. I cannot say at a
distance what you should do next. There, perhaps, I can tell you."

What was it that had impelled her to say it? She could not have told.
Murray looked at her. Her very presence seemed to infuse new
determination into him.

It was strange about this woman, what a wonderful effect she had on him.

A few days before he would have laughed at any one who had suggested
that any woman might have aroused in him the passions that were now
surging through his heart. Ten thousand years ago, perhaps, he would
have seized her and