ll tremulous face.

"What a hope-inspiring lawyer you have, father!"

"I would not want a truer," said he loyally.

"We won't have one of these cloud-bursts again, I promise you. But
when you have been under a strain for months, and things are stretched
tighter and tighter, and at last something makes things snap, why you
just can't help--well," she ended, "a man would have done something
else, I suppose, but it might have been just as bad."

"Worse!" avowed her father.

"Anyhow, it's all over. I'll just repair some of the worst ravages of
the storm, and then we'll talk about our programme for the trial."

As she was arranging her hair before her father's mirror, she saw, in
the glass, the old man stoop and take something from the waste-basket.
Turning his back to her, he cautiously examined the object.

She left the mirror and came up behind him.

"What are you looking at, dear?"

He started, and glanced up.

"Oh--er--that editorial Mr. Bruce referred to." He rubbed his head
dazedly. "If that should happen, with me even indirectly the cause of
it--why, Katherine, it really would be pretty bad!" He held out the
_Clarion_. "Perhaps, after all, you had better read it."

She took the paper. The _Clarion_ had from the first opposed the
city's owning the water-works, and the editorial declared that the
present situation gave the paper, and all those who had held a similar
opinion, their long-awaited triumph and vindication. "This failure is
only what invariably happens whenever a city tries municipal
ownership," declared the editorial. "The situation has grown so
unbearably acute that the city's only hope of good water lies in the
sale of the system to some private concern, which will give us that
superior service which is always afforded by private capital.
Westville is upon the eve of a city election, and we most emphatically
urge upon both parties that they make the chief plank of their
platforms the immediate sale of our utterly discredited water-works
to some private company."

The editorial did not stir Katherine as it had appeared to stir Bruce,
nor even in the milder degree it had stirred Doctor West. She was
interested in the water-works only in so far as it concerned her
father, and the _Clarion's_ proposal had no apparent bearing on his
guilt or innocence.

She laid the _Clarion_ on the table, without comment, and proceeded to
discuss the coming trial. The only course she had to suggest was that
t