She deliberately folded up a newspaper clipping and shoved it into her hand-bag on a chair beside the table.
Lawrence Macey met her eye unflinchingly.
"Suppose," he drawled, "just for the sake of argument, that you are right. What would you do?"
Constance looked at the unruffled exterior of the man. With her keen perception she knew that it covered just as calm an interior. He would have said the same thing if she had been a real detective, had walked up behind him suddenly in the subway crush, had tapped his shoulder, and whispered, "You're wanted."
"We are dealing with facts, not suppositions," she replied evasively.
Momentarily, a strange look passed over Macey's face. What was she driving at—blackmail? He could not think so, even though he had only just come to know Constance. He rejected the thought before it was half formed.
"Put it as you please," he persisted. "I am, then, this Graeme Mackenzie who has decamped from Omaha with half a million—it is half a million in the article, is it not?—of cash and unregistered stocks and bonds. Now what would you do?"
Constance felt unconsciously the shift which he had skilfully made in their positions. Instead of being the pursuer, she was now the pursued, at least in their conversation. He had admitted nothing of what her quick intuition told her.
Yet she felt an admiration for the sang-froid of Macey. She felt a spell thrown over her by the magnetic eyes that seemed to search her own. They were large eyes, the eyes of a dreamer, rather than of a practical man, eyes of a man who goes far and travels long with the woman on whom he fixes them solely.
"You haven't answered my hypothetical question," he reminded her.