NOTED FORGER A SUICIDE

With a little shriek, half-suppressed, she seized the paper.  It was Carlton.  There was his name.  He had shot himself in a room in a hotel in St. Louis.  She ran her eye down the column, hardly able to read.  In heavier type than the rest was the letter they had found on him: 

My dearest Constance,

When you read this I, who have wronged and deceived you beyond words, will be where I can no longer hurt you.  Forgive me, for by this act I am a confessed embezzler and forger.  I could not face you and tell you of the double life I was leading.  So I have sent you away and have gone away myself—­and may the Lord have mercy on the soul of

Your devoted husband, Carlton Dunlap.

Over and over again she read the words, as she clutched at the edge of the news-stand to keep from fainting—­“wronged and deceived you,” “the double life I was leading.”  What did he mean?  Had he, after all, been concealing something else from her?  Had there really been another woman?

Suddenly the truth flashed over her.  Tracked and almost overtaken, lacking her hand which had guided him, he had seen no other way out.  And in his last act he had shouldered it all on himself, had shielded her nobly from the penalty, had opened wide for her the only door of escape.

CHAPTER II

THE EMBEZZLERS

“I came here to hide, to vanish forever from those who know me.”

The young man paused a moment to watch the effect of his revelation of himself to Constance Dunlap.  There was a certain cynical bitterness in his tone which made her shudder.

“If you were to be discovered—­what then?” she hazarded.

Murray Dodge looked at her significantly, but said nothing.  Instead, he turned and gazed silently at the ruffled waters of Woodlake.  There was no mistaking the utter hopelessness and grim determination of the man.

“Why—­why have you told so much to me, an absolute stranger?” she asked, searching his face.  “Might I not hand you over to the detectives who, you say, will soon be looking for you?”

“You might,” he answered quickly, “but you won’t.”

There was a note of appeal in his voice as he pursued slowly, not as if seeking protection, but as if hungry for friendship and most of all her friendship, “Mrs. Dunlap, I have heard what the people at the hotel say is your story.  I think I understand, as much as a man can.  Anyhow, I know that you can understand.  I have reached a point where I must tell some one or go insane.  It is only a question of time before I shall be caught.  We are all caught.  Tell me,” he asked eagerly, bending down closer to her with an almost breathless intensity in his face as though he would read her thoughts, “am I right?  The story of you which I have heard since I came here is not the truth, the whole truth.  It is only half the truth—­is it not?”