It was uncanny, the way this man read her thoughts.

“You know whom they say quotes scripture,” she avoided.

“And am I a—­a devil?”

“I did not say so.”

“You hinted it.”

She had.  But she said, “No, nor hinted it.”

“Then you did not mean to hint it?”

She looked away a moment at the gay throng.  “Graeme Mackenzie,” she said, slowly, “what’s the use of all this beating about?  Why cannot we be frank with one another?”

She paused, then resumed, meditatively, “A long time ago I became involved with a man in a scheme to forge checks.  I would have done anything for him, anything.”

A cloud passed over his face.  She saw it, had been watching for it, but appeared not to do so.  His was a nature to brook no rivalry.

“My husband had become involved in extravagances for which I was to blame,” she went on.

The cloud settled, and in its place came a look of intense relief.  He was like most men.  Whatever his own morals, he demanded a high standard in her.

“We formed an amateur partnership in crime,” she hurried on.  “He lost his life, was unable to stand up against the odds, while he was alone, away from me.  Since then I have been helping those who have become involved, on the wrong side, with the law.  There,” she concluded simply, “I have put myself in your power.  I have admitted my part in something that, try as they would, they could never connect me with.  I have done it because—­because I want to help you.  Be as frank with me.”

He eyed her keenly again.  The appeal was irresistible.

“I can tell you Graeme Mackenzie’s story,” he began carefully.  “Six months ago there was a young man in Omaha who had worked faithfully for a safe deposit company for years.  He was getting eighty-five dollars a month.  That is more than it seems to you here in New York.  But it was very little for what he did.  Why, as superintendent of the safe deposit vaults he had helped to build up that part of the trust company’s business to such an extent that he knew he deserved more.

“Now, a superintendent of a safe deposit vault has lots of chances.  Sometimes depositors give him their keys to unlock their boxes for them.  It is a simple thing to make an impression in wax or chewing gum palmed in the hand.  Or he has access to a number of keys of unrented boxes; he can, as opportunity offers, make duplicates, and then when the boxes are rented, he has a key.  Even if the locks of unrented boxes are blanks, set by the first insertion of the key chosen at random, he can still do the same thing.  And even if it takes two to get at the idle keys, himself and another trusted employe, he can get at them, if he is clever, without the other officer knowing it, though it may be done almost before his eyes.  You see, it all comes down to the honesty of the man.”

He paused.  Constance was fascinated at the coolness with which this man had gone to work, and with which he told of it.