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Page 15
It was bold and ingenious. What a woman she was for meeting
emergencies. Murray, who had a will that had been accustomed to bend
others to his purposes except in the instance where they had bent
him and nearly broken him, recognized the masterful mind of
Constance. He was willing to allow her to play the game.
Thus Constance began collecting the very data that would have sent
Murray to jail for bribery. Day by day as she worked on, the
situation became more and more delicate. They found themselves alone
much of the time now. Beverley was, or pretended to be, busy on
other matters and avoided Dodge as much as possible. Only the
regular routine affairs passed through his hands, but he said
nothing. It gave him more time with her. Dumont came in as rarely as
it was possible.
And as they worked along gathering the data Constance came to admire
Murray more than ever. She worked patiently over the big books,
taking only those on which the accountant was not engaged at such
times as she could get them without exciting suspicion. Together
they dug out the extent of the frauds that had been practiced on the
Government for years back. From the letter files they rescued notes
and orders and letters, pieced them together into as near a
continuous record as they could make. With his own knowledge of the
books Dodge could count on making better progress on the essential
things than the regular accountant of the audit company. He felt
sure that they would finish sooner and that they would have a closer
report of the frauds of all kinds than could be uncovered by the man
who had been set on the trail of Dodge to discover just how much of
the illicit gains he had taken for himself.
Constance became aware soon that whenever she left the office at
night she was being followed. She had at first studiously repelled
the offers of Murray to see her home. It was not that he had taken
advantage of the situation into which she had put herself. He would
never have done that. Still, she wished a little more time to
analyze her own conflicting feelings toward him. Then, too, several
times in the crowded subway cars she had noticed a face that was
familiar. It was Drummond, never looking directly at her, always
engrossed in something else, yet never failing to note where she was
going. That must be, she reasoned, some of the work of Beverley and
Dumont.
Murray was now working feverishly. As he worked he found himself
feeling differently toward the whole affair. He actually came to
enjoy it with all its risks and uncertainty, to enjoy gathering the
data which, he should have said, ought really to be destroyed. Often
he caught himself wishing that everything had come out all right in
the end and that Constance really was his private secretary.
Every moment with her seemed now to pass so quickly that he would
willingly have smashed all the clocks and destroyed all the
calendars. Association with other women had been tame beside his new
friendship with her. She had suffered, felt, lived. She fascinated
him, as often over the books they would stop to talk, talk of things
the most irrelevant, yet to him the most interesting, until she
would bring him back inevitably to the point of their work and start
him again with a new power and incentive toward the purpose she had
in mind.
To Constance he seemed to fill a blank spot in her empty life. If
she had been bitter toward the world for what had happened to her,
the pleasure of helping another to beat that harsh world seemed an
unspeakably sweet compensation.
At last even Constance herself began to realize it. It was not,
after all, merely the bitterness toward society, that lured her on.
She was not a woman carved out of a block of stone. There was a
sweetness about this association that carried her along as if in a
dream. She was actually falling in love with him.
One day she had been working later than usual. The accountant had
shown signs of approaching the end of his task sooner than they had
expected. Murray was waiting, as was his custom, for her to finish
before he left.
There was no sound in the almost deserted office building save the
banging of a door echoing now and then, or an insistent ring of the
elevator bell as an anxious office boy or stenographer sought to
escape after an extra period of work.
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