ither at the office or outside. At last
he arrived home, to find Constance waiting anxiously.

"Did you get a check?" she asked, hardly waiting for his reply. "Let me
see it. Give it to me."

The coolness with which she went about it amazed him. "It has the
amount punched on it with a check punch," she observed as she ran her
quick eye over it while he explained his plan. "We'll have to fill up
some of those holes made by the punch."

"I know the kind they used," he answered. "I'll get one and a desk
check from the Gorham. You do the artistic work, my dear. My knowledge
of check punches, watermarks, and paper will furnish the rest. I'll be
back directly. Don't forget to call up the office a little before the
time I usually arrive there and tell them I am ill."

With her light-fingered touch she worked feverishly, partly with the
liquid ink eradicator, but mostly with the spun-glass eraser. First she
rubbed out the cents after the written figure "Twenty-five." Carefully
with a blunt instrument she smoothed down the roughened surface of the
paper so that the ink would not run in the fibers and blot. Over and
over she practised writing the "Thousand" in a hand like that on the
check. She already had the capital "T" in "Twenty" as a guide. During
the night in practising she had found that in raising checks only seven
capital letters were used--O in one, T in two, three, ten, and
thousand, F in four and five, S in six and seven, E in eight, N in nine
and H in hundred.

At last even her practice satisfied her. Then with a coolness born only
of desperation she wrote in the words, "Thousand 00/100." When she had
done it she stopped to wonder at herself. She was amazed and perhaps a
little frightened at how readily she adapted herself to the crime of
forgery. She did not know that it was one of the few crimes in which
women had proved themselves most proficient, though she felt her own
proficiency and native ability for copying.

Again the eraser came into play to remove the cents after the figure
"25." A comma and three zeros following it were inserted, followed by a
new "00/100." The signature was left untouched.

Erasing the name of "Green & Co.," presented greater difficulties, but
it was accomplished with as little loss of the protective coloring on
the surface of the check as possible. Then after the "Pay to the order
of" she wrote in, as her husband had directed, "The Carlton Realty Co."

Next came the water colo