The check was written and the office boy was started to the bank with it.  Carlton followed him at a distance, as he had on other occasions, ready to note the first sign of trouble as the boy waited at the teller’s window.  At last the boy was at the head of the line.  He had passed the check in and his satchel was lying open, with voracious maw, on the ledge below the wicket for the greedy feeding of stacks of bills.  Why did the teller not raise the wicket and shove out the money in a coveted pile?  Carlton seemed to feel that something was wrong.  The line lengthened and those at the end of the queue began to grow restive at the delay.  One of the bank’s officers walked down and spoke to the boy.

Carlton waited no longer.  The game was up.  He rushed from his coign of observation, out of the bank building, and dashed into a telephone booth.

“Quick, Constance,” he shouted over the wire, “leave everything.  They are holding up our check.  They have discovered something.  Take a cab and drive slowly around the square.  You will find me waiting for you at the north end.”

That night the newspapers were full of the story.  There was the whole thing, exaggerated, distorted, multiplied, until they had become swindlers of millions instead of thousands.  But nevertheless it was their story.  There was only one grain of consolation.  It was in the last paragraph of the news item, and read:  “There seems to be no trace of the man and woman who worked this clever swindle.  As if by a telepathic message they have vanished at just the time when their whole house of cards collapsed.”

They removed every vestige of their work from the apartment.  Everything was destroyed.  Constance even began a new water color so that that might suggest that she had not laid aside her painting.

They had played for a big stake and lost.  But the twenty thousand dollars was something.  Now the great problem was to conceal it and themselves.  They had lost, yet if ever before they loved, it was as nothing to what it was now that they had tasted together the bitter and the sweet of their mutual crime.

Carlton went down to the office the next day, just as before.  The anxious hours that his wife had previously spent thinking whether he might betray himself by some slip were comparative safety as contrasted with the uncertainty of the hours now.  But the first day after the alarm of the discovery passed off all right.  Carlton even discussed the case, his case, with those in the office, commented on it, condemned the swindlers, and carried it off, he felt proud to say, as well as Constance herself might have done had she been in his place.

Another day passed.  His account of the first day, reassuring as it had been to her, did not lessen the anxiety.  Yet never before had they seemed to be bound together by such ties as knitted their very souls in this crisis.  She tried with a devotion that was touching to impart to him some of her own strength to ward off detection.