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Carlton waited no longer. The game was up. He rushed from his coign of observation, out of the bank building, and dashed into a telephone booth.

“Quick, Constance,” he shouted over the wire, “leave everything. They are holding up our check. They have discovered something. Take a cab and drive slowly around the square. You will find me waiting for you at the north end.”

That night the newspapers were full of the story. There was the whole thing, exaggerated, distorted, multiplied, until they had become swindlers of millions instead of thousands. But nevertheless it was their story. There was only one grain of consolation. It was in the last paragraph of the news item, and read: “There seems to be no trace of the man and woman who worked this clever swindle. As if by a telepathic message they have vanished at just the time when their whole house of cards collapsed.”

They removed every vestige of their work from the apartment. Everything was destroyed. Constance even began a new water color so that that might suggest that she had not laid aside her painting.

They had played for a big stake and lost. But the twenty thousand dollars was something. Now the great problem was to conceal it and themselves. They had lost, yet if ever before they loved, it was as nothing to what it was now that they had tasted together the bitter and the sweet of their mutual crime.

Carlton went down to the office the next day, just as before. The anxious hours that his wife had previously spent thinking whether he might betray himself by some slip were comparative safety as contrasted with the uncertainty of the hours now. But the first day after the alarm of the discovery passed off all right. Carlton even discussed the case, his case, with those in the office, commented on it, condemned the swindlers, and carried it off, he felt proud to say, as well as Constance herself might have done had she been in his place.

Another day passed. His account of the first day, reassuring as it had been to her, did not lessen the anxiety. Yet never before had they seemed to be bound together by such ties as knitted their very souls in this crisis. She tried with a devotion that was touching to impart to him some of her own strength to ward off detection.

It was the afternoon of the second day that a man who gave the name of Drummond called and presented a card of the Reynolds Company.

“Have you ever been paid a little bill of twenty-five dollars by our company?” he asked.

Down in his heart Carlton knew that this man was a detective. “I can’t say without looking it up,” he replied.

Carlton touched a button and an assistant appeared. Something outside himself seemed to nerve him up, as he asked: “Look up our account with Reynolds, and see if we have been paid–what is it?–a bill for twenty-five dollars. Do you recall it?”

“Yes, I recall it,” replied the assistant. “No, Mr. Dunlap, I don’t think it has been paid. It is a small matter, but we sent them a duplicate bill yesterday. I thought the original must have gone astray.”

Carlton cursed him inwardly for sending the bill. But then, he reasoned, it was only a question of time, after all, when the forgery would be discovered.

Drummond dropped into a half-confidential, half-quizzing tone. “I thought not. Somewhere along the line that check has been stolen and raised to twenty-five thousand dollars,” he remarked.

“Is that so?” gasped Carlton, trying hard to show just the right amount of surprise and not too much. “Is that so?”

“No doubt you have read in the papers of this clever realty company swindle? Well, it seems to have been part of that.”

“I am sure that we shall be glad to do all in our power to cooperate with Reynolds,” put in Dunlap.