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Page 2
"Constance," he remonstrated, looking fearfully about. Instinctively
she felt that her accusation was unjust. Not even that had dulled
the hunted look in his face. "Perhaps--perhaps if it were that of
which you suspect me, we could patch it up. I don't know. But,
Constance, I--I must leave for the west on the first train in the
morning." He did not pause to notice her startled look, but raced
on. "I have worked every night this week trying to straighten out
those accounts of mine by the first of the year and--and I can't do
it. An expert begins on them in a couple of days. You must call up
the office to-morrow and tell them that I am ill, tell them
anything. I must get at least a day or two start before they--"
"Carlton," she interrupted, "what is the matter? What have you--"
She checked herself in surprise. He had been fumbling in his pocket
and now laid down a pile of 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 be 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
pays low for its temptations, too."
There had been nothing in the world Carlton would not have given to
make happy the woman who stood now, leaning on the table in cold
silence, with averted head, regarding neither him nor the pile of
greenbacks.
"Hundreds of thousands of dollars passed through my hands every
week," he resumed. "That business owed me for my care of it. It was
taking the best in me and in return was not paying what other
businesses paid for the best in other men. When a man gets thinking
that way, with a woman whom he loves as I love you--something
happens."
He paused in the bitterness of his thoughts. She moved as if to
speak. "No, no," he interrupted. "Hear me out first. All I asked was
a chance to employ a little of the money that I saw about me--not to
take it, but to employ it for a little while, a few days, perhaps
only a few hours. Money breeds money. Why should I not use some of
this idle money to pay me what I ought to have?
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