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Page 10
"A man can always shift for himself better if he has no
impediments," she said, speaking rapidly as if to bolster up her own
resolution. "A woman is always an impediment in a crisis like this."
In her face he saw what he had never seen before. There was love in
it that would sacrifice everything. She was sending him away from
her, not to save herself but to save him. Vainly he attempted to
protest. She placed her finger on his lips. Never before had he felt
such over-powering love for her. And yet she held him in check in
spite of himself.
"Take enough to last a few months," she added hastily. "Give me the
rest. I can hide it and take care of myself. Even if they trace me I
can get off. A woman can always do that more easily than a man.
Don't worry about me. Go somewhere, start a new life. If it takes
years, I will wait. Let me know where you are. We can find some way
in which I can come back into your life. No, no,"--Carlton had
caught her passionately in his arms--"even that cannot weaken me.
The die is cast. We must go."
She tore herself away from him and fled into her room, where, with
set face and ashen lips, she stuffed article after article into her
grip. With a heavy heart Carlton did the same. The bottom had
dropped out of everything, yet try as he would to reason it out, he
could find no other solution but hers. To stay was out of the
question, if indeed it was not already too late to run. To go
together was equally out of the question. Constance had shown that.
"Seek the woman," was the first rule of the police.
As they left the apartment they could see a man across the street
following them closely. They were shadowed. In despair Carlton
turned toward his wife. A sudden idea had flashed over her. There
were two taxicabs at the station on the corner.
"I will take the first," she whispered. "Take the second and follow
me. Then he cannot trace us."
They were off, leaving the baffled shadow only time to take the
numbers of the cab. Constance had thought of that. She stopped and
Carlton joined her. After a short walk they took another cab.
He looked at her inquiringly, but she said nothing. In her eyes he
saw the same fire that blazed when she had asked him if there was no
way to avoid discovery and had suggested it herself in the forgery.
He reached over and caressed her hand. She did not withdraw it, but
her averted eyes told that she could not trust even herself too far.
As they stood before the gateway to the steps that led down into the
long under-river tunnel which was to swallow them so soon and
project them, each into a new life, hundreds, perhaps thousands of
miles apart, Carlton realized as never before what it all had meant.
He had loved her through all the years, but never with the wild love
of the past two weeks. Now there was nothing but blackness and
blankness. He felt as though the hand of fate was tearing out his
wildly beating heart.
She tried to smile at him bravely. She understood. For a moment she
looked at him in the old way and all the pent-up love that would
have, that had done and dared everything for him struggled in her
rapidly rising and falling breast.
It was now or never. She knew it, the supreme effort. One word or
look too many from her and all would be lost. She flung her arms
about him and kissed him. "Remember--one week from to-day--a
personal--in the STAR," she panted.
She literally tore herself from his arms, gathered up her grip, and
was gone.
A week passed. The quiet little woman at the Oceanview House was
still as much a mystery to the other guests as when she arrived,
travel-stained and worn with the repressed emotion of her sacrifice.
She had appeared to show no interest in anything, to take her meals
mechanically, to stay most of the time in her room, never to enter
into any of the recreations of the famous winter resort.
Only once a day did she betray the slightest concern about anything
around her. That was when the New York papers arrived. Then she was
always first at the news-stand, and the boy handed out to her, as a
matter of habit, the STAR. Yet no one ever saw her read it. Directly
afterward she would retire to her room. There she would pore over
the first page, reading and rereading every personal in it.
Sometimes she would try reading them backward and transposing the
words, as if the message they contained might be in the form of a
cryptograph.
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