“Do you really, really want to know what I think?” asked Constance after he had at last told her his wretched story.  It was the first time that she had looked at him since she realized that he was unburdening the truth to her.

“Yes,” he answered eagerly, catching her eye.  “Yes,” he urged.

“I think,” she said slowly, “that you are running away from a fight that has not yet begun.”

It thrilled her to be talking so.  Once before she had tasted the sweetness and the bitterness of crime.  She did not stop to think about right or wrong.  If she had done so her ethics would have been strangely illogical.  It was enough that, short as their acquaintance had been, she felt unconsciously that there was something latent in the spirit of this man akin to her own.

Murray also felt rather than understood the bond that had been growing so rapidly between them.  His was the temperament that immediately translates feeling into action.  He reached into his breast pocket.  There was the blue-black glint of a cold steel automatic.  A moment he balanced it in his hand.  Then with a rapid and decisive motion of the arm he flung it far from him.  As it struck the water with a sound horribly suggestive of the death gurgle of a lost man, he turned and faced her.

“There,” he exclaimed with a new light in the defiant, desperate smile that she had observed many times before, “there.  The curtain rises—­instead of falls.”

Neither spoke for a few moments.  At last he added, “What shall I do next?”

“Do?” she repeated.  She felt now the weight of responsibility for interfering with his desperate plans, but it did not oppress her.  On the contrary, it was a pleasant burden.  “According to your own story,” she went on, “they know nothing yet, as far as you can see.  You would have forestalled them by taking this little vacation during which you could disappear while they would discover the shortage.  Do?  Go back.”

“And when they discover it?” he asked evidently prepared for the answer she had given and eager to know what she would propose next.

Constance had been thinking rapidly.

“Listen,” she cried, throwing aside restraint now.  “No one in New York outside my former little circle knows me.  I can live there in another circle unobserved.  For weeks I have been amusing myself by the study of shorthand.  I have picked up enough to be able to carry the thing off.  Discharge your secretary.  Put an advertisement in the newspapers.  I will answer it.  Then I will be able to help you.  I cannot say at a distance what you should do next.  There, perhaps, I can tell you.”

What was it that had impelled her to say it?  She could not have told.  Murray looked at her.  Her very presence seemed to infuse new determination into him.

It was strange about this woman, what a wonderful effect she had on him.

A few days before he would have laughed at any one who had suggested that any woman might have aroused in him the passions that were now surging through his heart.  Ten thousand years ago, perhaps, he would have seized her and carried her off in triumph to his clan or tribe.  To-day he must, he would win her by more subtle means.