r in
advance, declaring him flagrantly guilty, and demanding for him the
law's extremest penalty.

That editorial unloosed her long-collected wrath--wrath that had many
a reason. In Bruce's person Katherine had from the first seen the
summing up, the leader, of the bitterness against her father. All
summer he had continued his sharp attacks, and the virulence of these
had helped keep the town wrought up against Doctor West. Moreover,
Katherine despised Bruce as a powerful, ruthless, demagogic hypocrite.
And to her hostility against him in her father's behalf and to her
contempt for his quack radicalism, was added the bitter implacability
of the woman who feels herself scorned. The town's attitude toward her
she resented. But Bruce she hated, and him she prayed with all her
soul that she might humble.

She crushed the _Express_, flung it from her into the gutter, and
walked home all a-tremble. Her aunt met her in the hall as she was
laying off her hat. A spot burned faintly in either withered cheek of
the old woman.

"Who does thee think is here?" she asked.

"Who?" Katherine repeated mechanically, her wrath too high for
interest in anything else.

"Mr. Bruce. Upstairs with thy father."

"What!" cried Katherine.

Her hat missed the hook and fell to the floor, and she went springing
up the stairway. The next instant she flung open her father's door,
and walked straight up to Bruce, before whom she paused, bosom
heaving, eyes on fire.

"What are you doing here?" she demanded.

His powerful figure rose, and his square-hewn face looked directly
into her own.

"Interviewing your father," he returned with his aggressive calm.

"He was asking me to confess," explained Doctor West.

"Confess?" cried Katherine.

"Just so," replied Bruce. "His guilt is undoubted, so he might as well
confess."

Scorn flamed at him.

"I see! You are trying to get a confession out of him, in advance of
the trial, as a big feature for your terrible paper!"

She moved a pace nearer him. All the suppressed anger, all the hidden
anguish, of the last three months burst up volcanically.

"Oh! oh!" she cried breathlessly. "I never dreamt till I met you that
a man could be so low, so heartless, as to hound an old man as you
have hounded my father--and all for the sake of a yellow newspaper
sensation. But he's a safe man for you to attack. Yes, he's safe--old,
unpopular, helpless!"

Bruce's heavy brows lowered. He did not give back a