ing Blake with knowledge of his guilt. Might she not make some
further advance, gain some new clue, by confronting Bruce in similar
manner?

Ten minutes after she had left the office of Harrison Blake, Katherine
entered the _Express_ Building. From the first floor sounded a deep
and continuous thunder; that afternoon's issue was coming from the
press. She lifted her skirts and gingerly mounted the stairway, over
which the _Express's_ "devil" was occasionally seen to make
incantations with the stub of an undisturbing broom.

At the head of the stairway a door stood open. This she entered, and
found herself in the general editorial room, ankle-deep with dirt and
paper. The air of the place told that the day's work was done. In one
corner a telegraph sounder was chattering its tardy world-gossip to
unheeding ears. In the centre at a long table, typewriters before
them, three shirt-sleeved young men sprawled at ease reading the
_Express_, which the "devil" had just brought them from the nether
regions, moist with the black spittle of the beast that there roared
and rumbled.

At sight of her tall, fresh figure, a red spot in her either cheek,
defiance in her brown eyes, Billy Harper, quicker than the rest,
sprang up and crossed the room.

"Miss West, I believe," he said. "Can I do anything for you?"

"I wish to speak with Mr. Bruce," was her cold reply.

"This way," and Billy led her across the wilderness of proofs,
discarded copy and old newspapers, to a door beside the stairway that
led down into the press-room. "Just go right in," he said.

She entered. Bruce, his shirt-sleeves rolled up and his bared
fore-arms grimy, sat glancing through the _Express_, his feet crossed
on his littered desk, a black pipe hanging from one corner of his
mouth. He did not look round but turned another page.

"Well, what's the matter?" he grunted between his teeth.

"I should like a few words with you," said Katherine.

"Eh!" His head twisted about. "Miss West!"

His feet suddenly dropped to the floor, and he stood up and laid the
pipe upon his desk. For the moment he was uncertain how to receive
her, but the bright, hard look in her eyes fixed his attitude.

"Certainly," he said in a brusque, businesslike tone. He placed the
atlas-bottomed chair near his own. "Be seated."

She sat down, and he took his own chair.

"I am at your service," he said.

Her cheeks slowly gathered a higher colour, her eyes gleamed with a
pre-triu