"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."