Dumont was pale and almost speechless.  Beverley could ill suppress his smothered rage.  What could they do?  The tables had been turned.  If they objected to the amazing proposal Constance had made they might all go to jail.  Dodge even might go free, rich.  They looked at Dodge and Mrs. Dunlap.  There was no weakening.  They were as relentless as their opponents had been before.

Dumont literally tore the telephone from her.  “Never mind about that number, central,” he muttered.

Then he started as if toward the door.  The rest followed.  Outside the accountant had been waiting patiently, perhaps expecting Drummond to call on him to corroborate the report.  He had been listening.  There was no sound of high voices, as he had expected.  What did it mean?

The door opened.  Beverley was pale and haggard, Dumont worn and silent.  He could scarcely talk.  Dodge again held the door for Constance as she swept past the amazed accountant.

All eyes were now fixed on Dumont as chief spokesman.

“He has made a satisfactory explanation,” was all he said.

“I would lock all that stuff up in the strongest safe deposit vault in New York,” remarked Constance, laying the evidence that involved them all on Murray’s desk.  “It is your only safeguard.”

“Constance,” he burst forth suddenly, “you were superb.”

The crisis was past now and she felt the nervous reaction.

“There is one thing more I want to say,” he added in a low tone.

He had crossed to where she was standing by the window, and bent over, speaking with great emotion.

“Since that afternoon at Woodlake when you turned me back again from the foolish and ruinous course on which I had decided you—­you have been more to me than life.  Constance, I have never loved until now.  Nothing has ever mattered except money.  I never had any one else to think of, care for, except myself.  You have changed everything.”

She was gazing out of the window at the tall buildings.  There, in a myriad of offices, lay wealth untold, opportunity as yet untasted to seize that wealth.  Only for an instant she turned and looked at him, then dropped her eyes.  What lay that way?

“You are clear now, respected, respectable,” she said simply.

“Yes, thank God.  Clear and with a new ambition, thanks to you.”

She had been expecting this ever since that last night.  The relief of Murray to feel that the old score that would have ruined him was now wiped off the slate was precisely what she had anticipated.

Yet, somehow, it disappointed her.  She felt instinctively that her triumph was burning fast to ashes.

“Keep clear,” she faltered.

“Constance,” he urged, approaching closer and taking her cold hand.

Was she to be the one to hold him back in any way from the new life that was now before him?  What if Drummond, in his animosity, ever got the truth?  She gently unclasped her hand from his.  No, that happiness was not for her.