They tried new tricks. If it was a journey she took, some one went with her whom she had to shake off sooner or later. There were visits of peddlers, gas men, electric light and telephone men. They were all detectives, also, always seeking a chance to make a search that might reveal her secret. The janitor who collected the waste paper found that it had a ready sale at a high price. Every stratagem that Drummond's astute mind could devise was called into play. But nothing, not a scrap of new evidence did they find.
Yet all the time Constance was in direct communication with Mackenzie.
Graeme, in his enforced idleness, was more deeply in love with Constance now than ever. He had eyes for nothing else. Even his fortunes would have been disregarded, had he not felt that to do that would have been the surest way to condemn himself before her.
They had cut out the evening trips now, for fear of recognition. She was working faithfully. Already she had cleaned up something like fifty thousand dollars on the turn over of the stuff he had stolen. Another week and it would be some thousands more.
Yet the strain was beginning to show.
"Oh, Graeme," she cried, one night after she had a particularly hard time in shaking Drummond's shadows in order to make her unconventional visit to him, "Graeme, I'm so tired of it all—tired."
He was about to pour out what was in his own heart when she resumed, "It's the lonesomeness of it. We are having success. But, what is success—alone?"
"Yes," he echoed, thinking of his feeling that night when she had left him at the elevator, of the feeling now every moment of the time she was away from him, "yes, alone!"
With the utmost difficulty he restrained the wildly surging emotions within him. He could not know with what effort Constance held her poise so admirably, keeping always that barrier of reserve beyond which now and then he caught a glimpse.
"Let us cut out and bury ourselves in Europe," he urged.