prosecutor’s office.

“I thought you’d take it rather hard,” said Kennedy, a little slyly. “It sort of puts a spoke in that general municipal ownership scheme of yours—eh?”

Bruce paused belligerently before the prosecutor.

“See here, Kennedy,” he snapped out. “Because a man you’ve banked on is a crook, does that prove a principle is wrong?”

“Oh, I guess not,” Kennedy had to admit.

“Well, suppose you cut out that kind of talk then. But what are you going to do about the doctor?”

“The grand jury is in session. I’m going straight before it with the evidence. An hour from now and Doctor West will be indicted.”

“And what about to-morrow’s show?”

“What do you think we ought to do?”

“What ought we to do!” Again the editor’s fist crashed upon the desk. “The celebration was half in Doctor West’s honour. Do we want to meet and hurrah for the man that sold us out? As for the water-works, it looks as if, for all we know, he might have bought us a lot of old junk. Do we want to hold a jubilee over a junk pile? You ask what we ought to do. God, man, there’s only one thing to do, and that’s to call the whole damned performance off!”

“That’s my opinion,” said the prosecutor. “What do you think, Doctor Sherman?”

The young minister wiped his pale face.

“It’s a most miserable affair. I’m sick because of the part I’ve been forced to play—I’m sorry for Doctor West—and I’m particularly sorry for his daughter—but I do not see that any other course would be possible.”

“I suppose we ought to consult Mr. Blake,” said Kennedy.

“He’s not in town,” returned Bruce. “And we don’t need to consult him. We three are a majority of the committee. The matter has to be settled at once. And it’s settled all right!”

The editor jerked out his watch, glanced at it, then reached for his hat.

“I’ll have this on the street in an hour—and if this town doesn’t go wild, then I don’t know Westville!”

He was making for the door, when the newspaper man in him recalled a new detail of his story. He turned back.

“How about this daughter of Doctor West?” he asked.

The prosecutor looked at the minister.

“Was she coming home for the celebration, do you know?”

“Yes. She wrote Mrs. Sherman she was leaving New York this morning and would get in here to-morrow on the Limited.”

“What’s she like?” asked Bruce.

“Haven’t you seen her?” asked Kennedy.

“She hasn’t been home since I came back to Westville. When I left here she was a tomboy—mostly legs and freckles.”

The prosecutor’s lean face crinkled with a smile.

“I guess you’ll find she’s grown right smart since then. She went to one of those colleges back East; Vassar, I think it was. She got hold of some of those new-fangled ideas the women in the East are crazy over now—about going out in the world for themselves, and——”

“Idiots—all of them!” snapped Bruce.

“After she graduated, she studied law. When she was back home two years ago she asked me what chance a woman would have to practise law in Westville. A woman lawyer in Westville—oh, Lord!”

The prosecutor leaned back and laughed at the excruciating humour of the idea.

“Oh, I know the kind!” Bruce’s lips curled with contempt. “Loud-voiced—aggressive—bony—perfect frights.”

“Let me suggest,” put in Doctor Sherman, “that Miss West does not belong in that classification.”

“Yes, I guess you’re a little wrong about Katherine West,” smiled Kennedy.

Bruce waved his hand peremptorily. “They’re all the same! But what’s she doing in New York? Practising law?”

“No. She’s working for an organization something like Doctor Sherman’s—The Municipal League, I think she called it.”

“Huh!” grunted Bruce. “Well, whatever she’s like, it’s a pretty mess she’s coming back into!”

With that the editor pulled his hat tightly down upon his forehead and strode out of the Court House and past the speakers’ stand, across whose front twin flags were being leisurely festooned. Back in his own office he picked up the story he had finished an hour before. With a sneer he tore it across and trampled it under foot. Then, jerking a chair forward to his typewriter, his brow dark, his jaw set, he began to thump fiercely upon the keys.

CHAPTER III

KATHERINE COMES HOME

Next morning when the Limited slowed down beside the old frame station—a new one of brick was rising across the tracks—a young woman descended from a Pullman at the front of the train. She was lithe and graceful, rather tall and slender, and was dressed with effective simplicity in a blue tailored suit and a tan straw hat with a single blue quill. Her face was flushed, and there glowed an expectant brightness in her brown eyes, as though happiness and affection were upon the point of bubbling over.

Standing beside her suit-case, she eagerly scanned the figures about the station. Three or four swagger young drummers had scrambled off the smoker, and these ambassadors of fashion as many hotel bus drivers were inviting with importunate hospitality to honour their respective board and bed. There was the shirt-sleeved figure of Jim Ludlow, ticket agent and tenor of the Presbyterian choir. And leaning cross-legged beneath the station eaves, giving the effect of supporting the low roof, were half a dozen slowly masticating, soberly contemplative gentlemen—loose-jointed caryatides, whose lank sculpture forms the sole and invariable ornamentation of the façades of all Western stations. But nowhere did the young woman’s expectant eyes alight upon the person whom they sought.

The joyous response to welcome, which had plainly trembled at the tips of her being, subsided, and in disappointment she picked up her bag and was starting for a street car, when up the long, broad platform there came hurrying a short-legged little man, with a bloodshot, watery eye. He paused hesitant at a couple of yards, smiled tentatively, and the remnant of an old glove fumbled the brim of a rumpled, semi-bald object that in its distant youth had probably been a silk hat.

The young woman smiled back and held out her hand.

“How do you do, Mr. Huggins.”

“How de do, Miss Katherine,” he stammered.

“Have you seen father anywhere?” she asked anxiously.

“No. Your aunt just sent me word I was to meet you and fetch you home. She couldn’t leave Doctor West.”

“Is father ill?” she cried.

The old cabman fumbled his ancient headgear.

“No—he ain’t—he ain’t exactly sick. He’s just porely. I guess it’s only—only a bad headache.”

He hastily picked up her suit-case and led her past the sidling admiration of the drummers, those sovereign critics of Western femininity, to the back of the station where stood a tottering surrey and a dingy gray nag, far gone in years, that leaned upon its shafts as though on crutches. Katherine clambered in, and the drooping animal doddered along a street thickly overhung with the exuberant May-green of maples.

She gazed with ardent eyes at the familiar frame cottages, in some of which had lived school and high-school friends, sitting comfortably back amid their little squares of close-cropped lawn. She liked New York with that