“This superintendent earned more than he received.  He deserved it.  But when he asked for a raise, they told him he was lucky to keep the job,—­they reduced him, instead, to seventy-five dollars.  He was angry at the stinging rebuke.  He determined to make them smart, to show them what he could do.

“One noon he went out to lunch and—­they have been looking for him ever since.  He had taken half a million in cash, stocks, and bonds, unregistered and hence easily hypothecated and traded on.”

“And his motive?” she asked.

He looked at her long and earnestly as if making up his mind to something.  “I think,” he replied, “I wanted revenge quite as much as the money.”

He said it slowly, measured, as if realizing that there was now nothing to be gained by concealment from her, as if only he wanted to put himself in the best light with the woman who had won from him his secret.  It was his confession!

Acquaintances with Constance ripened fast into friendships.  She had known Macey, as he called himself, only a fortnight.  He had been introduced to her at a sort of Bohemian gathering, had talked to her, direct, as she liked a man to talk.  He had seen her home that night, had asked to call, and on the other nights had taken her to the theater and to supper.

Delicately unconsciously, a bond of friendship had grown up between them.  She felt that he was a man vibrating with physical and mental power, long latent, which nothing but a strong will held in check, a man by whom she could be fascinated, yet of whom she was just a little bit afraid.

With Macey, it would have been difficult to analyze his feelings.  He had found in Constance a woman who had seen the world in all its phases, yet had come through unstained by what would have drowned some in the depths of the under-world, or thrust others into the degradation of the demi-monde, at least.  He admired and respected her.  He, the dreamer, saw in her the practical.  She, an adventurer in amateur lawlessness saw in him something kindred at heart.

And so when a newspaper came to her in which she recognized with her keen insight Lawrence Macey’s face under Graeme Mackenzie’s name, and a story of embezzlement of trust company and other funds from the Omaha Central Western Trust of half a million, she had not been wholly surprised.  Instead, she felt almost a sense of elation.  The man was neither better nor worse than herself.  And he needed help.

Her mind wandered back to a time, months before, when she had learned the bitter lesson of what it was to be a legal outcast, and had determined always to keep within the law, no matter how close to the edge of things she went.

Mackenzie continued looking at her, as if waiting for the answer to his first question.

“No,” she said slowly, “I am not going to hand you over.  I never had any such intention.  We are in each other’s power.  But you cannot go about openly, even in New York, now.  Some one besides myself must have seen that article.”